In this conflict between youth and its elders, youth is the incarnation of reason pitted against the rigidity of tradition. Youth puts the remorseless questions to everything that is old and established,—Why? What is this thing good for? And when it gets the mumbled, evasive answers of the elders, it applies its own fresh, clean spirit of reason to the institutions, customs, and ideas, and finding them stupid, inane, or poisonous, turns instinctively to overthrow them and build in their place the things with which its visions teem.

Page 437. Quote republished in "Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty," Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought 1, no. 1 (Spring, 1965), pp. 21–22. - "Youth" (1912) - II