Quotes About Legacy

Indeed we all try to raise our children as if our past experiences are important for their future, but they rarely are.

Most of the MacCormicks and Bedells are college grads and according to my father the youngsters have all been educated beyond their intelligence.

Daughters of the American Revolution don't have group sex because they don't want to have to write all those thank-you notes.

Americans lived in the moment, without history and thus without prophecy.

me, "Dickie Johnson and I were born together, grew up together, had lots of women together, and got old together, but he died before me.

Subdesenvolvimento não se improvisa. É obra de séculos.

When you and I are dead, and all the rest of us who served in the last war, in all the countries," she said, "there'll be a chance of world peace. Not till then.

John Osborne laughed. "It's not the end of the world at all," he said. "It's only the end of us. The world will go on just the same, only we shan't be in it. I dare say it will get along all right without us.

after all that I had read during the night. Even into this quiet place the war had reached like the tentacle of an octopus and had touched this girl and brought about her death. Like some infernal monster, still venomous in death, a war can go on killing people for a long time after it's all over.

Even into this quiet place the war had reached like the tentacle of an octopus and had touched this girl and brought about her death. Like some infernal monster, still venomous in death, a war can go on killing people for a long time after it's all over.

This may have been what John and I were brought together for,' she said. 'In thirty years the world may need one of these little ones.' She paused. 'It may be Ronnie or it may be Willem, or it may be little Pierre who does great things for the world,' she said. 'But when that happens, monsieur, it will be because I met your son to show him Paris, and we fell in love.

Like some infernal monster, still venomous in death, a war can go on killing people for a long time after it's all over.

The German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, was one of the few authentic geniuses among nineteenth-century statesmen.

No serious writer would claim that the reign of Western civilization was unblemished. Yet there are those who would insist that there was nothing whatever good about it. This position is absurd.

From the point of view of most African-Americans, American independence postponed emancipation by at least a generation.

The question was simply this: Would the world be French or British?

Niall Ferguson

Salvo unas cuantas excepciones, la élite política británica, a diferencia de la élite intelectual mayoritariamente socialista, encontró muy difícil aceptar que el imperio tenía que desaparecer como precio a pagar por la victoria.

In the end, the British sacrificed her Empire to stop the Germans, Japanese and Italians from keeping theirs. Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire's other sins?

Sir Richard Turnbull, the penultimate Governor of Aden, once told Labour politician Denis Healey that 'when the British Empire finally sank beneath the waves of history, it would leave behind it only two monuments: one was the game of Association Football, the other was the expression Fuck off.'   

Only by historical methods can we explain why, over the past thirty years, so many countries created forms of debt that, by design, cannot be inflated away; and why, as a result, the next generation will be saddled for life with liabilities incurred by their parents and grandparents.

John [Ivan] the Terrible

Niall Ferguson

an Empire-less Britain would be just a 'cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herring and potatoes'.