So many of the moderns we see are such very poor stuff. If they're the children of the future we're willing to die young.

Henry James

She supposed the young men of Link's generation couldn't have manners like Mr. Powther's, though she didn't know why. Wars and atom bombs and the fact that there was so much hate in the world might have something to do with it.

Ann Petry, The Narrows (1953)

Two-heading was dying out, he lamented. Folks what can look at things in more than one way is done got rare.

Grange Copeland, in: Alice Walker, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970)

The great danger [...] in the world today is that the very feeling and conception of what is a human being might well be lost.

Richard Wright zu Jean-Paul Sartre