This quote is from the 1905 short story of Thomas Mann "The Blood of the Walsungs," so you see new century, new millennium, it doesn't matter. The arrogance of youth is constant. This reminds me of the my classmates in "advanced" high school English.
"They sat there at table, in their low, luxuriously cushioned chairs, with their spoilt, dissatisfied
faces. They sat in splendour and security, but their words rang as sharp as though sharpness, hardness, alertness, and pitiless clarity were demanded of them as survival values. Their highest praise was a grudging acceptance, their criticism deft and ruthless; it snatched the weapons from one's hand, it
paralysed enthusiasm, made it a laughing-stock. "Very good," they would say of some masterpiece whose lofty intellectual plane would seem to have put it beyond the reach of critique. Passion was a blunder-it made them laugh. Von Beckerath, who tended to be disarmed by his enthusiasms, had hard
work holding his own-also his age put him in the wrong. He got smaller and smaller in his chair, pressed his chin on his breast, and in his excitement breathed through his mouth-quite unhorsed by the brisk arrogance of youth. They contradicted everything-as though they found it impossible, discreditable, lamentable, not to contradict. They contradicted most efficiently, their eyes narrowing to gleaming cracks. They fell upon a single word of his, they worried it, they tore it to bits and replaced it by another so telling and deadly that it went straight to the mark and sat in the wound with quivering shaft."
