Quotes About Legacy

Louis Slotin, at Los Alamos in 1946.

So ended the days of the last dinosaur circus.

No more will. No more freedom. Nothing new but agonizing death and never good shall come of it. We are the last of those who gave you breath and form, millions of years ago. We are the last of those your kind defied and ruthlessly destroyed. We are the last Precursors. And now we are legion.

They understood the universe in ways we never will. We can't unlock their secrets—but now, apparently, we can destroy all they ever made. That's what I call progress.

There is nothing so momentary as a sporting achievement, and nothing so lasting as the memory of it.

The past is never dead. It's not even past; if it were there would be no grief or sorrow.

If a man lived long enough, his past would always overtake him, no matter how fast he ran or how morally he tried to live subsequently. And how men dealt with that law ultimately revealed their true natures.

Our actions have consequences that last long after us, entwining the present with the future in ways we cannot begin to understand.

Did the fact that Martin Luther King diddled all those women change what he did for his people? Or Franklin Roosevelt? General Eisenhower? Not one whit. Men are men, and gods are for storybooks. And if you've read your Edith Hamilton or Jane Harrison—or the Old Testament, for that matter—you'll know that gods acted like men most of the time, or worse.

We should be covered into the earth by people who loved us.

Because death is the end, and if a man doesn't speak before it silences him, then the things he holds closest die with him.

William Faulkner ever said wasn't written in one of his novels, but spoken during an interview in Paris: The past is never dead; it's not even past.

The Secret History.

He remembered a story he had once heard, about a god who had three sons—Whiteman, Blackman, and Gorilla. Blackman and Gorilla sinned against their father, and so the god took his favored son Whiteman to the west, along with all of his wealth, which Whiteman inherited. Gorilla and his kin went to live in the forests. Blackman remained where he was born, but was impoverished, yearning for the wealth inherited by Whiteman.

I've told my children that when I die, to release balloons in the sky to celebrate that I graduated. For me, death is a graduation

16So don't be dismayed when the wicked grow rich and their homes become ever more splendid. 17For when they die, they take nothing with them. Their wealth will not follow them into the grave.

The meek might someday inherit the earth but it will be one that doesn't remember them. Lang

She's gone, yes. She'll live on in the people who loved her.

Finally, one would question the absurd idea that anyone would be proud to belong to a race that could create a hellish nightmare like "Gettysburg.

Try to get all your posthumous medals in advance.

For Shackleton, self-promotion had been essential all the way. He had paid all his expenses with media tie-ins, one way or another: auctioning off news and picture rights before he left, taking special postage stamps along to be franked at the south pole. After he made it, his bestseller had nine translations. He spruced up his expedition ship into a museum and charged admission.

There is a word for such exercises we Germans do," Canaris said. "Vergangenheitsbewältigung—coming to terms with the past." Karl

What dream, what hope, what despair drives us to the things we do, just to desert us when the deed is done? What hollow things are they, motive and reason, born at night to fade so quickly in the sunlight of consequence? What we do in life lives on inside us, long after ambition and fear lie frosted and opaqued on forgotten shores. What we do in life, more than what we think or say, is what we are.

We can deny the past, but we can't escape its torment because the past is a speaking shadow that keeps pace with the truth of what we are, step for step, until we die.