--- August Comte, quoted by Bobby Duffy in the essay "The Bunk of Generational Talk," WSJ, Oct 22, 2021
From the WSJ piece:
For the 19th-century French sociologist Auguste Comte, the generation was a key factor in “the basic speed of human development.” “We should not hide the fact that our social progress rests essentially upon death; which is to say that the successive steps of humanity necessarily require a continuous renovation…from one generation to the next,” Comte wrote. Generations differ from one another, and that’s a good thing, since it prevents society turning into a “stagnant pond.”
