[sachinag]

Actually, that's what makes it better. The argument against Tom Brokaw's Greatest Generation isn't that those WWII heroes were so special; it's that no one generation could be.

I could have been more precise with a modifying phrase such as "by accident of birth", but that was too unwieldy. The upvoted comments are specific to the GG argument, which are suboptimal, because they don't work as good writing unless you've seen PG's original.

(Yeah, I'm a part-time writer/editor to pay the beer bills, and I can get defensive about my writing. Sue me. You're better at design/coding/picking up chicks than I.)

[rms]

Yours may be "good writing" but you completely changed the meaning of the statement. In my opinion, it's important to mention WW2 -- it's easy to make the statement not offensive to The Greatest Generation by completely removing the reference.