Out of the past come the standards for judging the present; standards in turn to be shaped by the practice of present-day dramatists into broader standards for the next generation.
Millennials, and the generations that follow, are shaping technology. This generation has grown up with computing in the palm of their hands. They are more socially and globally connected through mobile Internet devices than any prior generation. And they don't question; they just learn.
For those that don't know much about 'American Idiot' or Green Day, just know that it's my generation's The Who's 'Tommy' or Pink Floyd's 'The Wall.' It was an album that really spoke to a generation. The theatrical show encapsulates that feeling and brings it to an even wider audience.
The difference between me and other people in my generation is instead of saying the Internet's killing the record business, I say, 'Who cares about the record business, the Internet is enhancing music.'
I owe a debt of gratitude to two other living Justices. Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg paved the way for me and so many other women in my generation. Their pioneering lives have created boundless possibilities for women in the law. I thank them for their inspiration and also for the personal kindnesses they have shown me.
I think it is so great right now that we are in an age where there's an African American president in office. I think it is important for our generation to really witness that.
When the blood of thousands of Americans is shed, the impact lingers. For a generation after the Civil War, the Republican injunction to 'vote as you shot' kept the party dominant for decades; from 1868 to 1912, only one Democrat - Grover Cleveland - won the White House.
I think my generation has had an unbelievably easy time profiting from the world that was made for us by our parents and grandparents. We are essentially a rather frivolous generation. The Blair government was my generation's shot at power. It had some good things, but it had some flaws.
What has gone catastrophically wrong in England and the States is that for 30 years we've lost the ability to talk about the state in positive terms. We've raised a generation or two of young people who don't think to ask, 'What can the state do that is good?'
The late Seventies was the death of the manufacturing age in the United States. It was also a time when the Pictures Generation artists were getting started. They co-opted the language of advertising. The factory disappeared, and weirdly, so did the art object - it was the age of making gestures, not objects.
My thing is every generation of Americans has to answer what we call the 'Superman Question.' Superman comes, lands in America. He's illegal. He's one of these kids. He's wrapped up in a red bullfighter's cape. And you've got to decide what we're gonna do with Superman.
I've got weird conflicting feelings about my generation.
Every generation of rock musician will understand that we wouldn't be anywhere without the support of teenagers buying the records.
There is a part of my generation that is not on social media because they have happy lives and they're not trying to connect with anybody. And there are other people who are on social media because they need to connect.
If you're raised with a poverty mentality, nothing is going to change it. I do know some really stingy billionaires. I come from such a generation of hand-to-mouthers.
The baby boomers are the most spoiled, most self-centered, most narcissistic generation the country's ever produced.
While the women of the older generation were thankful if only they succeeded in obtaining 'a work and a duty,' however monotonous and wearing it might be, the will of the younger generation for a pleasurable labour has fortunately increased.
I picture Generation X as young adults living in a state of perpetual adolescence.
I have a dream that in the not-too-distant future, Visy Tumut will spend around $100 m to expand our clean energy generation here and take in additional waste forest wood to generate clean renewable energy and sell it into the power grid.
My father and his brothers and sisters were childhood Irish jig champions in the Bronx. At our family celebrations, they all get out and do the jig. And of course, the younger generation, me and my cousins and my brothers, we have our own Americanized renditions of the Irish jig, which is a bit more like 'Lord of the Dance.'
To build more human economies in Africa, governments must be far more strategic, wise, and forward-looking in their expenditure and build diverse economies that are going to deliver the jobs for the next generation.
When punk came along, I found my generation's music. I grew up listening to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd, 'cause that was what got played in the house. But when I first saw the Stranglers, I thought, 'This is it.'
I come from a Hasidic background; I am only one generation removed.
It doesn't give me any satisfaction to think that my concerns will be validated by my grandchildren's generation. I would love to be wrong in everything. My grandchildren are my stake in the near future, and it's my great hope that they might one day say, 'Grandpa was part of a great movement that helped to turn things around.'
'Harry Potter' created a generation of readers in an era when kids could have disappeared into the depths of the Internet. That's no small feat. Every book series owes J.K. Rowling a debt of gratitude.
I was part of a generation that believed in socialism and finally found that belief corroded and destroyed. That is not renouncing Communism or socialism. It's reaching a certain degree of enlightenment about what the Soviet Union practices.
There are a lot of people of my generation in New Zealand literature, young writers on their first or second books, that I'm just really excited about. There seems to be a big gap between the generation above and us; it seems to be quite radically different in terms of form and approach.
We have a generation of black actors playing leading roles on film and TV - Idris Elba, Chiwetel Ejiofor - which is great and is breaking the mould.
Hell is reimagined by every generation. We have to reinvent the worst so that we can reinvent the best.
I always try to set a positive example for my generation and promote confidence.
It is a quirk of American culture that each generation of nonconservatives sees the right-wingers of its own generation as the scary ones, then chooses to remember the right-wingers of the last generation as sort of cuddly.
A whole generation was raised to learn about comedy from 'The Simpsons.' To get to be in a booth with Homer and Marge and be in Springfield - it was unimaginable the emotions that I felt.
I'm sorry, but in my generation and where I came from, only sailors got tattoos. Not ladies.
We have the new greatest generation. We don't need as large a military due to the technology we have, the equipment we have outfitting our personnel. They really are storm troopers.
Just as our forefathers saved and invested to build what we, the current generation, are enjoying today, so, too, we must plant trees so that our sons and daughters, and their sons and daughters, can enjoy the shade.
I'm the fourth generation to be in show business. It's pretty neat; it's nice to have that family history.
