I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it. – Henry David Thoreau

It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous. – Charles Dudley Warner

Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves. – D.H. Lawrence, Classical American Literature, 1922