Quotes About Legacy

To be enlisted posthumously into competing national memories, bolstered by the numbers of which your life has become a part, is to sacrifice individuality. It is to be abandoned by history, which begins from the assumption that each person is irreducible.

History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something.

Churchill said that history would be kind to him, because he intended to write it himself. Yet in his vast histories and memoirs, he presented his own decisions as self-evident, and credited the British people and Britain's allies. Today what Churchill did seems normal, and right. But at the time he had to stand out.

If young people do not begin to make history, politicians and inevitability will destroy it.

But the concentration camps are not where most of the victims of National Socialism and Stalinism died. These misunderstandings regarding the sites and methods of mass killing prevent us from perceiving the horror of the twentieth century. Germany was the site of concentration camps liberated by the Americans and the British in 1945; Russian Siberia was of course the site of much of the Gulag, made

The last Lithuanian grand duke who even knew the Lithuanian language died the year Columbus discovered America.

You're not the last of the old Jedi, Luke, you're the first of the new

Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day. — Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Live a good long life. Grow old and die after I do. And if you can, die laughing.

Death is not goodbye.

Forget me, but don't forget my name.

Things become bearers of memory and information, especially when enhanced by stories that expand their capacity to carry meaning.

Without Ruth, there would be no record.

For women, cloth also tended to represent the work of their hands, the female branches of family trees, and notions of the feminine ideal. Passing on a textile, then, symbolized women's ability, creativity, and continuance.

There are two things that grant a bit of immortality: books and children

La posición que una tumba ocupe en la naturaleza es importantísima. Una tumba bien ubicada y bien expuesta a la "respiración cósmica" puede hacer que el alma del difunto viva en el más allá, y reportar felicidad y bienestar a generaciones futuras. Contrariamente, la tumba mal dispuesta de un antepasado puede causar continuas desgracias a sus descendientes.

I'm a survivor, " I said. But I didn't think that claim would carry much weight in an obituary.

Call him Judas if you want but he did it for reasons much older than silver.

Floyd Patterson grew up there, right?

it's tempting to start universities and build hospitals when you want to put a little gloss on your life as one of the greatest thieves in American history.

Why did the man who would become revered for generations as the Great Emancipator hesitate to do his "emancipating," and if it did take him so long, what is so "great" about that?

My ancestors are smiling at me imperial, can you say the same?

I would like to make a bold claim right here at the outset: the fact that we die is the most important fact about us. There is nothing that has more weight in our lives.

The fact that we die is what makes what we do and who we do it with matter.