Quotes About Legacy

Life must not be squandered. A person got from life what he put ino it.

How such incredibly powerful creatures could be so vulnerable was a crime against the universe. The tragic futility of it all was what really got me. The rhino's brilliant million-year evolutionary effort to build up three tons of muscle, bone and horn to defend itself meant nothing in a modern technological world that didn't care a fig about them. The fact that our grandchildren may never see a rhino in the wild again was a pivotal reason to continue to try and save them.

But yet, but yet . . . the night he died, they [the elephants] were right there outside his house. And they came every evening for the next week as the sun set, until his ashes were scattered on the land he loved. Then they left.

Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.

No university in the world has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great library ... When this is no longer true, then will our civilization have come to an end.

We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free from their authority.

I didn't know that painters and writers retired. They're like soldiers – they just fade away.

Napoleon embodied a new way of fighting wars: a combination of individual genius and mass organization, and objectives far more ambitious than those of his predecessors.

acabó sepultado en Waterloo en 1815.

Wilbur and Orville were rapacious misanthropes who were all too happy to stop progress in its tracks by stifling brilliant innovators, particularly Curtiss, all to stuff their pockets with more money than they could spend in ten lifetimes.

the history of science cannot be written by pulling scientific 'firsts' out of their historical context, but only by seeing with eyes and minds of our historical characters.

I knew the record would stand until it was broken.

The strongest thing that baseball has going for it today are its yesterdays.

Did you know that he was the one responsible for the umpire giving hand signals for a ball or a strike? Raising his right hand for a strike, you know, and stuff like that. He'd be up at bat and he couldn't hear and he couldn't talk, so he'd look around at the umpire to see what the pitch was, a ball or a strike. That's where the hand signs for the umpires calling balls and strikes began. That's a fact. Very few people know that.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum.

By 1969, when I celebrated 45 years in the music business, I also had 45 people in our musical family.

Time does not die; only people.

Kurt and I weren't the closest of friends, but I knew him well enough to be devastated by his death. For such a quiet person, he was so excited about having a child.

There was nothing dishonourable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one's own generation.

L'idée de ma survie dans ma postérité ne me touche pas beaucoup. L'avenir, cette énigme irritante, m'ennuie. Mais choisir son passé, se laisser flotter dans le temps révolu comme on remonte la vague, toucher au fond de soi le secret de ceux qui nous ont engendré: voilà qui permet de rêver, qui laisse le passage à une autre vie, à un flux rafraîchissant.

Our world, like a charnel-house, is strewn with the detritus of dead epochs.

The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile.

I think ... that I when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I lived, the breath I breathed.

The counsel of the dead is not profitable to the living.