This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard
dying... but nobody thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft,
pillage and rapine, culture and vice... but nobody admitted it.
-- Alfred Bester, "The Stars My Destination"
Youth is not a time of life, it is a state of mind it is a temper of
the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a predominance
of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over love of ease....