Quotes About Legacy

Oscar Wilde said: 'Biography lends to death a new terror.' Well, memoir adds that same promise to parenting.

an unbroken line of unrelated people

It's not who you are that matters. It's what you do with who you are. The blood running through your veins is the only blood that matters. When you go out into the world, you have the chance to leave the past behind

stability. It is often noted that, of all existing institutions in the West, higher education is one of most enduring. Oxford University, the longest continuously running university in the English-speaking world, was founded in the twelfth century.4

The most damaging legacy of the West has been its power to decide who our enemies are, turning us not only against our own people, like North and South Korea, but turning me against myself.

To live an ethical life is to be held accountable for history.

Writing is a family trade like anything else: you are more entitled to the profession if your ancestors have already set up shop.

After I'm dead I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.

After I am dead I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.

Quid est, Catulle? quid moraris emori? [...]

By the time the seasons turned through four more reapings, he had been crowned king of Yudah. By the time I was counted a man, he had added the crown of the kingdom of Israel

I wanted to give a sense of the people of the book, the different hands that had made it, used it, protected it.

For a girl raised on the rim of a wilderness, it was strange to be in a place where every inch of ground had been settled for hundreds upon hundreds of years. I felt the press of people, and the press of ghosts—great hordes of those who had lived and walked before me.

If our forefathers make the world awry, must our children be the ones who pay to right it?

Jarret interrupted. "Colonel Bruce, you must be aware of the rising difficulty for men like me in the thoroughbred world. You must know that for some who supported the Southern cause, the war is not over. They deplore their reduced circumstances and do not care to see someone like me

The stories that grow up around a king are strong vines with a fierce grip.

I need, I suppose, to account for my life, and for my part in Caleb's crossing from his world into mine, and what flowed on from it.

We look at the Ark of the Covenant and remember who we are.

But the stories that grow up around a king are strong vines with a fierce grip. They pull life from whatever surfaces they cling to, while the roots, maybe, wither and rot until you cannot find the place from which the seed of the vine has truly sprung. That was my task: to uncover those earliest roots. And he had directed me to the seedbed.

American women have taken on nontraditional jobs in every war since they made musket balls in the Civil War, and after every war they have gone back home, but as a crane operator observed, "Women were different in World War II: They didn't want to go back home and many of them didn't. And if they did go back home, they never forgot, and they told their daughters, 'You don't have to be just a homemaker. You can be anything you want to be.

At American Airlines, we have built a business around the love of travel that has lasted three quarters of a century. And I'm pretty sure we're just getting started.

After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.

Sooner or later your life is going to flash before your eyes; make sure it's worth watching.

Above all, for his merciless, contemptuous treatment of Clifford Chatterley, blown to bits in Flanders in 1918, Lawrence can be damned to hell. Damned but not banned.