Quotes About Legacy

Each generation writes off earlier errors as the result of bad thinking, of less able minds--and then confidently embarks on making fresh errors of its own.

I hope that at the end of the seven years, people will say that I have been of some inspirational value to them at home in terms of inclusiveness and abroad, I look forward to representing Ireland.

About the main character approaching death in old age, observed by her husband . . .] He saw that she had already laid down a large portion of her life long ago. Piece by piece she had given it away as she wrestled with existence, as her self was absorbed as nourishment into his life and the life of the children and the community. And laid down most piercingly, as she abandoned, one by one, the shapes of the dreams she had planned. Only to take them up again in other forms.

Love is the soul of the world, though its body bleeds, and we must learn to bleed with it. Love is also the seed and milk and the fruit of the world, though we can partake of it in greed or reverence. We are born, we eat, and learn, and die. We leave a tracery of messages in the lives of others, a little shifting of the soil, a stone moved from here to there, a word uttered, a song, a poem left behind. I was here, each of these declare. I was here.

Children need to see that they are part of a history and that the story of their family is a living thing. God tells it, a new story in each generation, and each must hold hands across the sea of time, joining together the ones who went before and the ones who come after. It is given from above. Little do we understand this in the beginning, but time teaches us many things we did not expect to learn. That is life. It is the same everywhere.

Abstract academic discussions have a way of leaving their mark on entire civilizations, as the events of this century have proved all too well.

He had become like a son to Pawel because Pawel had no wife or child, and because Pawel was a prince without a kingdom, who searched within himself for a father's heart.

These honors that you give to me are not for me alone. They are for those who, dying young, now sleep in the earth with their unspoken poems, waiting for the Last Day.

In extraordinary circumstances and against the odds, Churchill became Prime Minister instead of Halifax, and that one decision changed the course of history.

You talk about a tide of history. Well, there are some occasions when one man seems to stand his ground and just refuses to accept getting washed away. That's how we arrogant Americans won the New World. And that's how you, Mr Churchill, have saved the Old World. But for you, the whole of Europe would by now be one vast concentration camp. Nobody's ever going to forget that.

JFK's great virtue, and the essential difference between him and George W. Bush, was that he had an instinctive appreciation for the chaotic forces of history.

Why waste a life in search of an epitaph?

Por qué desperdiciar la vida buscando un epitafio? «Te recordamos con cariño.» ¿Quién salvo un idiota quiere algo así cincelado sobre su cabeza? No es más que incontinencia sentimental.

To be known for one's saddest story is not the road to notoriety anyone would willingly choose.

Suzuki-roshi's historic Transmission of the dharma to one and only one American man haunts everything that ever happened at Zen Center.

Very few people are remembered for long after they're in the ground.

Without a past you can't have a future.

In 1968 King said the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were penned by men who owned slaves, thus, a "nation that got started like that . . . has a lot of repenting to do.

Instead, we are two symbols in a 400-year-old battle of guilt and innocence.

Slavery casts a long shadow across our lives. The spoils we reaped from forcing people to work without wages and treating them with grievous inhumanity continue to haunt us in a racial gulf that seems impossible to overcome.

around Frederick, just as it had around George

Ten percent is the golden number – the number that changes the world. Be part of that ten percent. Be a hero. Let future generations talk about you

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death." —Leonardo da Vinci

And when all our eyes are closed, when even the ghosts have gone, what will be left of our beloved world?" Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. "Copenhagen