Ali Smith Quotes

I feel I grew up in a different century than I live in. I think most of them are changes for the good.

You don't have to be old in America to say of a world you lived in: That world is gone.

For the first time in human evolution, the individual life is long enough, and the cultural transformation swift enough, that the individual mind is now a constituent player in the global transformation of human culture.

With the emergence of civilization, the rate of change shifted from hundreds of thousands of years to millennia. With the emergence of science as a way of knowing the universe, the rate of change shifted to centuries.

Some people accuse the new generation of being ignorant, maybe ignorant for the old generation, but it's a new language.

My generation had the best years. We missed the Second World War and caught the outburst of rock 'n' roll.

I've always loved the future. But I must say the future changes a lot quicker than it used to. An era used to last thirty or forty years - now we're lucky if it's five.

The future's come and gone; it's a thing of the past. That once impossibly exotic expression 'the year 2000,' for so long evocative of silver suits and robots in pinnies, now feels antiquated.

From education by the Church to education by Germanic value is a step of several generations.

The 1990's sure aren't like the 1980's.

When you consider that our technology has advanced from the first telephones to smart phones in roughly a century, it's easy to understand why it seems like tomorrow is arriving faster than it ever did.

Every generation renews itself in its own way; there's always a reaction against whatever is standard.

I'm fascinated by how much has changed from one generation to another. There are young people growing up now for whom apartheid is just a distant memory and the idea of military service is an abstract notion.

Each generation wants new symbols, new people, new names. They want to divorce themselves from their predecessors.

If you do an interview in 1960, something it's bound to change by the year 2000. And if it doesn't, then there's something drastically wrong.

And for all my rampant technological optimism, sometimes I think I'd be more comfortable if I were regarding these transcendental events from one thousand years remove... instead of twenty.

You're an old-timer if you can remember when setting the world on fire was a figure of speech.

There certainly have been a lot of changes, although they come in such gradations that most people have either forgotten, or, if they're too young, they never knew about them in the first place.

I don't think people change; electronics change, the things we have change, but the way we live doesn't change.

Everything is so unstable in these times of progress at any cost, and social customs and methods of life alter so rapidly, that a few years now suffice to change completely the face of usages which, at their inception, bade fair to outlive the age - so enthusiastically were they welcomed by the public.

So, we've gone from covered wagons to going to the moon in just under 100 years. For all the centuries and thousands of years before us, people walked or rode horses, cows, camels or whatever. This so-called modern era, from the late 19th century through now, has been the period of the most amazing development, discovery, innovation and acceleration of change that humans have ever experienced. And it hasn't slowed down yet.

If your social consciousness seems stuck in 1975, 2014 is gonna be a rough ride.

Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.

One generation's idea of fast pace might be different from a later generation's.

[Bill] Clinton's voice, his manner of speaking and his terminology, "Back in those days... Yeah, back those days... You know, we didn't have the internet back then." My grandfather said, "Back in those days, we didn't have automobiles".