There's a piece I've seen quoted in the past, written by a Roman (I think) along the lines of "Young people today have no values. They have no respect for their elders ...." etc., etc.

Can anyone supply the full quotation - in English please. My Latin is a little rusty!

I'm not sure if any of these are the ones you're looking for, but they may help, and are of interest.

Youth Today

Well, the Greek Plato said:

"The democratic youth ... lives along day by day, gratifying the desire that occurs to him, at one time drinking and listening to the flute, at another downing water and reducing, now practising gymnastic, and again idling and neglecting everything; and sometimes spending his time as though he were occupied in philosophy."

My thanks to you both. Some things don't change, do they?

Maybe, just maybe, the world will survive and continue in the hands of today's feckless lot.

Happy Christmas, on the strict condition that nobody finds that offensive!

This got me intrigued. I knew there was another quote, more along the lines of 'rotten kids'. I remembered reading another classical quote. So I dug a bit. You'll never guess what I found.

There is such a quote, but it's a hoax.

"The Library of Congress' excellent book,
Respectfully Quoted (1989), lists this quote (page 42, quote number 195):

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they allow disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children now are tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

*About* this quote, this is what LC has to add:

Attributed to SOCRATES by Plato, according to William L. Patty and Louise S. Johnson, Personality and Adjustment, p.277 (1963) This passage was very popular in the 1960s and its essence was used by the Mayor of Amsterdam, Gijsbert van Hall, following a street demonstration in 1966, as reported by The New York Times, April 3, 1966, p. 16.

This use prompted Malcolm S. Forbes to write an editorial on youth. Forbes, April 15, 1966, p. 11.

In that same issue, under the heading "Side Lines," pp. 5-6, is a summary of the efforts of researchers and scholars to confirm the wording of Socrates, or Plato, but without success. Evidently, the quotation is spurious. "