On Youth

Famous quotes containing the word youth:

    The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.
    Policy statement, 1944, of the Youth League of the African National Congress. pt. 2, ch. 4, Fatima Meer, Higher than Hope (1988)

    It is hard living down the tempers we are born with. We
    all begin well, for in our youth there is nothing we
    are more intolerant of than our own sins writ large in
    others and we fight them fiercely in ourselves; but we
    grow old and we see that these our sins are of all sins
    the really harmless ones to own, nay that they give a
    charm to any character, and so our struggle with them
    dies away.
    Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)