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"What strikes one about the activist young is their lack of zest. Their obscenities are wooden, their insolence without sparkle, and even their violence is trancelike. They dissipate without pleasure and are vain without a purpose. The revolution of the young is not against regimentation but against effort, against growth and, above all, against apprenticeship. They want to teach before they learn, want to retire before they work, want to rot before they ripen. They equate freedom with effortlessness, and power with instant gratification."

"Never have the young taken themselves so seriously, and the calamity is that they are listened to and deferred to by so many adults. A society that takes it solemn adolescents seriously is headed for serious trouble. How humorless and laughable the solemn young! One realizes that one of the chief differences between an adult and a juvenile is that the adult knows when he is an ass while the juvenile never does. There is a link between seriousness and dehumanization. Is there anything more serious than a cow grazing in a pasture? The nonhuman cosmos is immersed in an ocean of seriousness. Man alone can smile and laugh."

"We are told that the young have a special talent for diagnosing the ills of our age. I doubt whether this is true. The young have a genius for discovering imagined grievances. It goes without saying that imagined grievances cannot be cured but they enable the young to evade those aspects of reality which do not minister to their self-importance. "The imagined ills" says Lauren Van Der Post, "enable them to avoid the proper burden that life lays on all of us."

"It is true that present-day young are idealistic. But theirs is the easy idealism that condemns abuses and pushes aside any thought that would reveal the difficulties and complexities inherent in righting wrongs. They are not willing to do the hard work by which alone the world can be improved. Hearing what they say, and seeing what they do, one suspects that one of the main functions of the young's idealism is finding good reasons for doing bad things."

"One has the impression that the young do not want to, or perhaps cannot, grow up. Our campuses have become dour, playless nurseries echoing with doctrinaire baby talk. You see six-foot babies clamoring for power and protesting against universities not having adequate arrangements for child care."

"Never has youth been face to face with more breathtaking opportunities and more deadly influences, and never before has character been so decisive a factor in the survival of the young. Nowadays a ten year-old must be possessed of a strong character in order not to get irrevocably flawed and blemished. The road from boyhood to manhood has become sievelike: those without the right size of character slip into pitfalls and traps. The society of the young is at present almost as subject to the laws of sheer survival as any animal society. In the Bay Area you can see the young preyed upon by dope pushers, pimps, perverts and thugs. The supposedly most sheltered generation is actually the most exposed." -Eric Hoffer