Quotes About Legacy

A compassionate government keeps faith with the trust of the people and cherishes the future of their children.

What we won when all of our people united ... must not be lost in suspicion and distrust and selfishness and politics. ... Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as president.

If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it.

Behind Caroline was her schoolroom full of bright, eager students. God had given them to her as a gift, to show her that the sacrifices she'd made did have meaning. His purposes for her life would be partly fulfilled in them, and in those children's futures.

History has a way of forgetting the mistresses of great men. Even if they have talent.

Despite my lovely diction I am going to die.

I don't want to spend a fortune on my cremation urn, but I really do want to look nice at my memorial service.

Having an eternal family is the only way to achieve ultimate joy.

One hundred and fifty years ago, the respect we now have for nurses and the intense training that nurses must undergo was nothing but a seed in Florence Nightingale's imagination. If we believe that nurses are some of the most respectable and hardworking people in our community, we owe that belief to Florence Nightingale.

That edict remains in place to the present day.

It has become a cliché to say that one person can make a difference, but the life of Mahatma Gandhi confronts us with the enduring truth of that statement.

Louis XV's contention that after him would come the deluge

Judaeo-Christian legacy informs the way that even most materialist sceptic thinks and behaves. Whether we like it or not, that legacy has built the history that spawned us, and shaped the attitudes that linger, often unpleasantly, in the dark recesses of our minds.

Lynn Thorndike

Alfonso the Wise of Castile (1252-1284)

In Spain, for instance, where the Visigoths ruled for more than two hundred years, there is not a single building left to illustrate their architecture, just as scarcely a word in the Spanish language can be traced back to their tongue.

We therefore owe our universities to the Middle Ages.

Abbey of Cluny

Nothing is left to us of the peace and prosperity of our ancestors except the crimes that have ruined that prosperity.

Once, [Rabbi Chanoch] Teller was traveling with 16 of his [18] offspring ... while changing planes in Frankfurt, Teller noticed a German woman gaping. 'Are all of these your children?' the woman asked. 'From one wife?' 'Yes, God has blessed me with all these children,' the rabbi replied. 'Haven't you heard about the population problem?'the woman sniffed. 'How many more children do you want to have?' Rabbi Teller paused and looked the woman in the eye: 'About 6 million,' he said.

When Marie-Madeleine Fourcade died on July 20, 1989, at the age of seventy-nine, she became the first woman to be given a funeral at Les Invalides, a splendid complex of buildings in Paris that celebrates

I cannot help feeling that to die at the height of a man's career, universally honoured and admired, to die while great issues are still commanding the whole of his interest, to be taken from us at the moment when he could already see ultimate success in view—is not the most unenviable of fates." A number of those present thought Churchill was talking about himself, as well as the man to whom he was paying tribute.

In the late 1960s, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade pulled back the veil cloaking her wartime activities in her gripping memoir, Noah's Ark, which was rightly described by MI6's Kenneth Cohen as "a Homeric saga" of her and Alliance's daily life under German occupation. But like Fourcade herself, the memoir is little known today.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me.