I grew up as a Democrat in a very strong Democratic family, but I will tell you that the Democratic Party that exists in this country is not the Democratic Party I grew up around.
Don't judge the past by the standards of today. It won't work. They're incompatible.
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.
What's vice today may be virtue, tomorrow.
Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.
That which an age considers evil is usually an unseasonable echo of what was formerly considered good - the atavism of an old ideal.
The wisdom of one generation will be folly in the next.
Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.
When I was in my 20s, I felt guilty if I didn't exercise - now I feel guilty if I do. It's time I could be spending with my family.
The majority of us don’t want to be farmers, see farmers, pay farmers, or hear their complaints. Except as straw-chewing figures in children’s books, we don’t quite believe in them anymore
Cultural standards evolve. The meaning of the public interest also, of course, evolves.
I'm no longer interested in making political films. There's something old-fashioned about them. Young people now don't care for politics. It isn't present in life as it used to be. And increasingly I like films which reflect present-day reality.
A hundred years ago Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter was given an A for adultery; today she would rate no better than a C-plus.
I felt like if any two people had any kind of sexual affinity for each other they had to sleep with each other immediately, otherwise it was a terrible betrayal and waste...Fortunately, I'm relieved of those obsessions now. It's really wonderful. It's really wonderful not feeling you have to sleep with everybody.
Divorce has become so easy nowadays that women have stopped crying at weddings.
I have seen the day, when, if a man made himself ridiculous, the world would laugh at him. But now, everything that is mean, disgusting, and absurd, pleases them but so much the better!
Taboos are falling across our culture like dominoes. What was unspeakable yesterday dominates talk shows today.
Today we are fighting Communism. Okay. If I'd been alive fifty years ago, the brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go and fight that. History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.
I know people who have literally quit their jobs to spend more time with their children, and I go, 'Wow,' my dad used to go to work at 7 o'clock in the morning and he'd come back at 7:30 and we'd kind of see him walk in and then he'd go upstairs and suddenly he'd be in a T-shirt and grumpy. There wasn't much in the way of conversation that went on.
The problem with the youth of today' is that one is no longer part of it.
I've become more cause-driven as I've got older. Maybe that's a result of having kids; you become less carefree and more worried about things.
There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.
Every age and every nation has certain characteristic vices, which prevail almost universally, which scarcely any person scruples to avow, and which even rigid moralists but faintly censure. Succeeding generations change the fashion of their morals with the fashion of their hats and their coaches; take some other kind of wickedness under their patronage, and wonder at the depravity of their ancestors.
As we get older, things seem less important.
What were once vices are the fashion of the day.
