Elders

Famous quotes containing the word elders:

    Like children, the elders are a burden. But unlike children, they offer no hope or promise. They are a weight and an encumbrance and a mirror of our own mortality. It takes a person of great heart to see past this fact and to see the wisdom the elders have to offer, and so serve them out of gratitude for the life they have passed on to us.
    Kent Nerburn (20th century)

    If the elders have no values, their children and grandchildren will turn out badly.
    Chinese proverb.

    ...I am who I am because I’m a black female.... When I was health director in Arkansas ... I could talk about teen-age pregnancy, about poverty, ignorance and enslavement and how the white power structure had imposed it—only because I was a black female. I mean, black people would have eaten up a white male who said what I did.
    —Joycelyn Elders (b. 1933)