Quotes About Legacy

History is a symphony of echoes heard and unheard. It is a poem with events as verses.

Weather is so nineteenth-century in its effects

A wise man once told me, Life's greatest fear is having knowledge of something, and dying before having the opportunity to share it." -Charles Blair

I don't know what to make of myself. A lot of the time, despite my deepest hungers and best efforts, I see blackness. But I am planting a young oak tree. I really am. It'll be here centuries after I'm gone. Assuming I choose to leave.

In a few minutes, Lee and Grant reached across to each other from their horses and shook hands. When they met again, Grant would be President of the United States, and Lee, in the great forgotten chapter of his life, would be doing more than any other American to heal the wounds of war.

It was a problem that needed squaring away and I squared it away for them. By now it seemed like it was something I was doing all my life. If you count my father sending me out to beat up other boys so he could win beer bets, maybe it was. Evidently

When I lay down the pen the taper of life will expire: my existence will terminate my tale.

Much of this world vanished after Columbus, swept away by disease and subjugation. So thorough was the erasure that within a few generations neither conqueror nor conquered knew that this world had existed.

Voltaire, Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes never had a chance to speak with these men or even know of their existence—and here, at last, we begin to appreciate the enormity of the calamity, for the distintegration of native America was a loss not just to those societies but to the human enterprise as a whole.

Of present fame think little, and of future less the praises that we receive after we are buried, like the flowers that are strewed over our grave, may be gratifying to the living, but they are nothing to the dead.

Posthumous charities are the very essence of selfishness, when bequeathed by those who. when alive, would not have contributed.

Sing, boy! sing! The ages are waiting for you. Sing! sing! All the world will hear you. God knows what will come of it.

The future requires kids; without them, there's eventually no tomorrow. In time, of course, everybody runs out of tomorrows. The one thing you can say about the future, Joseph Brodsky has written, is that it won't include you. That's true, and yet the dyad of money and children plots you way out there in that world of tomorrows you don't get. Your dream, then, is of a nothingness where an investment of love lives on. You believe in a time that's not your own.

Loyalty—in its darkest form, which left so much death as its legacy to the twentieth century—rids the divided self of anxiety and guilt, so that murder smiles.

How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children.

It is not tolerable, it is not possible, that from so much death, so much sacrifice and ruin, so much heroism, a greater and better humanity shall not emerge.

France cannot be France without greatness.

The graveyards are full of indispensable men.

The national task that had been incumbent upon me for 18 years is hereby confirmed.

A posthumously, everyone loves us. (A titre posthume, - Tout le monde nous aime)

Historians conquer the past, not the future. (Les historiens conquièrent Le passé, non l'avenir)

Hitler not from a woman is born : he is the child of the men bittemess. (Hitler n'est pas né d'une femme, Mais de l'amertume des hommes)

Massoud is dead, but not the hope ! (Massoud est mort, Mais pas l'espoir !)