Quotes About Legacy

I carry the seeds of death within me and plant them wherever I linger long enough to love. My parents died so others could live; now I live, so others must die.

Not at all,' said Dom Cristão. 'I think we've taken a step toward something truly magnificent. But humankind almost never forgives true greatness.

Rigorous extrapolation, a gosh-wow love of gadgets, and mystical adventures in strange and mysterious places; every major stream in speculative fiction today can be traced back to authors who were writing before the publishing categories existed. From among the readers in the twenties and thirties who loved any or all of these authors arose the first generation of science fiction writers, who knew themselves to be continuing in a trail that had been blazed by giants.

Everyone dies. Everyone leaves. What matters is the things you build together before they go. What matters is the part of them that continues in you when they're gone." - Valentine Wiggin

Too proud to change your name in exchange for a job. Not proud, sir, said Runnel. But Runnel of Farzibeck won't die here to have a waterless coward rise in his place.

A weak King must be what other Kings have been; a strong King is himself, and from then on the meaning of the name of King is changed.

Death is not a tragedy to the one who dies. To have wasted the life before that death, that is the tragedy.

She loved him. He loved her. In the absence of understanding, that was as good a reason as any for living together and making babies and raising them up and throwing them out of the house and then going through the long slow decline together until one of them died and left the other alone again, understanding as little as ever about what their spouses really wanted, who they really were.

The human need to leave something of yourself behind is universal.

Val," said Mother, "goodness trumps greatness any day." "Not in the history books," said Valentine. "Then the wrong people are writing history, aren't they?" said Father.

My job isn't to be friends. My job is to produce the best soldiers in the world. In the whole history of the world. We need a Napoleon. An Alexander. Except that Napoleon lost in the end, and Alexander flamed out and died young. We need a Julius Caesar, except that he made himself dictator, and died for it. My job is to produce such a creature, and all the men and women he'll need to help him. Nowhere in that does it say I have to make friends with children.

No greatness, then.' 'Val,' said Mother, 'goodness trumps greatness any day.' 'Not in the history books,' said Valentine. 'Then the wrong people are writing history, aren't they?' said Father.

But humanity doesn't want to die. As a species, we have evolved to survive. And the way we do it is by straining and straining and, at last, every few generations, giving birth to genius. The one who invents the wheel. And light. And flight. The one who builds a city, a nation, an empire.

I am old enough now to have all the memories of my people locked within my head. I remember things that happened long before I was born. I remember things that never happened at all. I live in memory. –Anton

Sometimes David kills Goliath, and people never forget. But there were a lot of little guys Goliath had already mashed into the ground. Nobody sang songs about those fights…

Everyone dies. Everyone leaves. What matters is the things you build together before they go. What matters is the part of them that continues in you when they're gone.

The human race has always produced a vast surplus of human beings and of wealth, and it has used up almost all of it either on stupid monuments like the pyramids or on brutal, bloody, pointless wars. We want you to unite the world so that this waste can finally stop.

Changing the world is good for those who want their names in books. But being happy, that is for those who write their names in the lives of others

On the contrary—there can be no greater honor to a parent than to have a child who is greater.

Never mind,' said Mazer Rackham. 'The politicians are afraid of you, but they can't destroy your reputation yet. That won't be done until the historians get at you in thirty years.

Are great men ever really good? I know they can be, but we judge them by a different standard. Greatness changes them, whatever they were to start with. It's like war—does any war ever settle anything? But we can't judge that way. The test of a war isn't whether it solved things. You have to ask, Was fighting the war better than not fighting it? And I guess the same kind of test ought to be used on great men.

Living men forget the lessons of the past. But the ancestors never forget.

No, to understand who a person really was, what his or her life really meant, the speaker for the dead would have to explain their self-story—what they meant to do, what they actually did, what they regretted, what they rejoiced in. That's the story that we never know, the story that we never can know—and yet, at the time of death, it's the only story truly worth telling.

I'll tell your story,' said Ender. 'Then I will truly live forever.