Quotes About Legacy

And thus ended the third Crusade, less destructive of human life than the two first, but quite as useless.

Folks double my age and older often run down a conversation tracking a vanishing world that will, with the passing of their memory, vanish entirely.

Alexander von Humboldt was the] greatest scientific traveller who ever lived.

You can therefore think the thoughts of every sage, every artist, every financier, every captain of industry who ever existed, for thoughts never die.

They did what they did, and moved forward despite whatever trail of ashes they left behind.

Ada wondered about his hundreds of tunes. Where were they now and where might they go if he died.

If every generation helps the next take one step up, imagine where we might all be someday.

All I can say is that we are mistaken to gouge such a deep rift in history that the things old men and old women know have become so useless as to be not worth passing on to grandchildren.

If you mean slaves, you only remember what they allowed you to remember. Even if Davis Bend was really as humane as you believe, they kept their misery to themselves, kept it a mystery to you. I promise that's true. Think of it as a great gift, a mark of affection. Their protection of your memory.

Miss Howell, I worry that the pains your father has taken to educate you will result in little but finding himself with a wit on his hands.

When time is remote enough nobody amounts to much.

In her heart, though, she wondered, Is anything remembered forever?

where the Coffins had lived ever since Noah's flood (if, indeed, they had not merely returned thither after that temporary displacement)

but I see the resentments of the dead are eternal.

There are heroes and, emphatically, heroines enough in this history. Yielding to the temptation to focus on their courage, however, may miss the point. Part of the legacy of people like Ella Baker and Septima Clark is a faith that ordinary people who learn to believe in themselves are capable of extraordinary acts, or better, of acts that seem extraordinary to us precisely because we have such an impoverished sense of the capabilities of ordinary people.

Escribe tus críticas en la arena, y tus cumplidos en el mármol».

It would take only a few thousand terabytes of hard-drive space to archive a human's entire audiovisual experience from cradle to grave.

Just as individuals age and die, so do lineages: Only debt is forever.

The empire of the Pharaohs was old before Rome was a twinkling in Odysseus's eye, wise before China had been discovered, and over and done with before our founding fathers came down from Mount Olympus to give us the Bible and the US Constitution—

We fight on so that something that remembers being human might survive.

Yet how did they know to preserve their dead for thousands of years without cryonic suspension? And how did they build their giant pyramids, made out of stone blocks bigger and heavier than shipping containers, quarried from mountains hundreds of miles from the Valley of the Kings?" Obviously, Mary noted, empires that endured for thousands of years couldn't possibly have achieved anything notable without the helpful guidance of interstellar white saviors—

the strongest manacles are born in the blood.

Franz Josef, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, was well into his sixties. His wife, the Empress Elisabeth, had been assassinated years before by an anarchist, his only son had died in a murder-suicide pact, and now the Archduke, his heir, was dead. The fate of Europe might well depend on what a bitter old man decided.

Had Julius lived in a happier age for men of his complexion, the world might have had a black Aesop or Grimm