Quotes About Legacy

My father was an historian

People don't remember me. Really. It's not any paranoid thing; I just have this habit of slipping through memories. It doesn't bother me all that much, except I guess that's a lie; it does. For some reason, I test very high on forgettability.

Hola... me llamo Íñigo Montoya; tú mataste a mi padre; disponte a morir.

Nobody takes out a sword nowadays and cries, Hello. My name is Inigo Monotoya. You killed my father, prepare to die!

I am not the Dread Pirate Roberts, he said, my name is Ryan. I inherited this ship from the previous Dread Pirate Roberts...

Later, years later even, sometimes I might say, How about the duel on the cliff with Inigo and the man in black? and my father would gruff and grumble and get the book and lick his thumb, turning pages till the mighty battle began.

History is a ribbon, always unfurling. History is a journey. And as we continue our journey, we think of those who traveled before us . . .

IN A WORLD STILL RULED BY KINGS, President George Washington's decision to not seek a third term clearly signaled that the United States would be governed by the people, not any ruler-for-life.

She does, certain; the best of young folks is, they remind us of the old ones. 'Tis nateral to cling to life, folks say, but for me, I git impatient at times. Most everybody's gone now, an' I want to be goin'. 'Tis somethin' before me, an' I want to have it over with. I want to be there 'long o' the rest o' the folks. I expect to last quite awhile, though; I may see ye couple o' times more, John.

He wanted to feel as if he were—to play on his famous line from On the Waterfront—a "contender," someone who mattered, someone who had fought the good fight. He wanted to feel as if he had made a difference, left a mark, and not just on acting. What he did not want to be was an "unthinker," the way he described those people who never examined themselves or their place in the world.

History is nothing more than a series of small yesterdays.

The best use of life is to spend it for something that outlasts it.

his last testament, written a few hours before his death, would contain a final blast against the Jews as responsible for the war which he had started and which was now finishing him and the Third Reich.

The man who founded the Third Reich, who ruled it ruthlessly and often with uncommon shrewdness, who led it to such dizzy heights and to such a sorry end, was a person of undoubted, if evil, genius.

Dietrich Eckart, twenty-one years older than Hitler, was often called the spiritual founder of National Socialism.

Such were the men whom Hitler gathered around him in the early years for his drive to become dictator of a nation which had given the world a Luther, a Kant, a Goethe and a Schiller, a Bach, a Beethoven and a Brahms.

What the King conquered, the Prince formed, the Field Marshal defended, the Soldier saved and unified

To explain the nineteenth century, that is, the contemporary world, one had to consider first what it had been bequeathed from ancient times. Three things, said Chamberlain: Greek philosophy and art, Roman law and the personality of Christ.

But not by Hermann Goering. He cheated the hangman. Two hours before his turn would have come he swallowed a vial of poison that had been smuggled into his cell. Like his Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, and his rival for the succession, Heinrich Himmler, he had succeeded at the last hour in choosing the way in which he would depart this earth, on which he, like the other two, had made such a murderous impact.

A man who would not love his father's grave is worse than a wild animal.

When the green hills are covered with talking wires and the wolves no longer sing, what good will the money you paid for our land be then

The white man will never be alone. Let him be just, and deal kindly with my people. For the dead are not powerless.

Through streets Cutter had once known now made strange by mortars, with neglected bunting in the colours of factions, with signs proclaiming idiot theories or new churches, new things, new ways of being, split and peeling. The raucousness and vigour were gone from the streets but still sensible in echo, in the buildings themselves: palimpsests of history, epochs, wars, other revolts embedded in their stones.

Saul was going to kill Anansi. They both knew it. Saul was going to kill Anansi and Loplop and King Rat, and Saul was going to die, all in an effort to prove that he was not his rat-father's son.