Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
--
Review of A Coat of Many Colours: Occasional Essays by Herbert Read, Poetry Quarterly (Winter 1945)George Orwell
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We are no longer the same, you wiser but not sadder, and I sadder but not wiser, for wiser I could hardly become without grave personal inconvenience, whereas sorrow is a thing you can keep adding to all your life long, is it not, like a stamp or an egg collection, without feeling very much the worse for it, is it not.
Samuel Beckett
Animals in their generation are wiser than the sons of men; but their wisdom is confined to a few particulars, and lies in a very narrow compass.
Joseph Addison
Give advertising time. That is the thing that it needs most. The advertising agency is the most precious infant among the professions. Is it fair to expect perfection in a profession that counts only a single generation to its credit? We are learning. I see no reason why advertising agencies, too, should not outlive their founders and the successors of their founders, growing wiser with each generation and gathering a priceless possession of recorded experience.
Bruce Fairchild Barton
The generation of Isaiah did not require the detailed description; his account, "I saw the Lord," &c., sufficed. The generation of the Babylonian exile wanted to learn all the details. ...Isaiah was so familiar with it that he did not consider it necessary to communicate it to others as a new thing, especially as it was well known to the intelligent.
Maimonides
Judge: I've listened to you for an hour and I'm none wiser.
Smith: None the wiser, perhaps, my lord but certainly better informed.F. E. Smith
Orwell, George
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