Quotes About Legacy

He [President Franklin D. Roosevelt] died in harness, and we may well say in battle harness, like his soldiers, sailors, and airmen, who side by side with ours are carrying on their task to the end all over the world. What an enviable death was his.

We have not journeyed all this way across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.

I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.

Let us… brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say: "This was their finest hour."

In the past we have had a light which flickered, in the present we have a light which flames, and in the future there will be a light which shines over all the land and sea.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Commonwealth and the Empire last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour.

Not that the title of top American ace wasn't flattering. After all, Rickenbacker had shot down seven enemy planes in as many months. It was just that all of the former recipients of the honor had all been killed, and he could not help but ruminate over what he called "the unavoidable doom that had overtaken its previous holders." Rickenbacker

My great-grandfather used to say to his wife, my great-grandmother, who in turn told her daughter, my grandmother, who repeated it to her daughter, my mother, who used to remind her daughter, my own sister, that to talk well and eloquently was a very great art, but that an equally great one was to know the right moment to stop.

Our riches, being in our brains, die with us... Unless of course someone chops off our head, in which case, we won't need them anyway.

Je ne vais jamais au lit sans réfléchir que le lendemain peut-être (si jeune que je sois) je ne serai plus là...; et pourtant personne, de tous ceux qui me connaissent, ne peut dire que je sois chagrin ou triste dans ma conversation...

A man dies ... only a few circles in the water prove that he was ever there. And even they quickly disappear. And when they're gone, he's forgotten, without a trace, as if he'd never even existed. And that's all.

Ich finde es einen wunderschönen Gedanken, dass etwas, das ein Mensch vor über hundert Jahren niedergeschrieben hat, noch immer da ist. Der Mensch selbst ist schon lange verschwunden, und vielleicht sogar schon vergessen, aber seine Gedanken sind immer noch da. Bücher sind Boten aus der Vergangenheit, weißt du? Botschaften aus der Vergangenheit für die Menschen der Zukunft. Wie kleine Zeitmaschinen.

God has been using creative people throughout history to bring glory and honor to His name.

Here is a great body of our Jewish citizens from whom have sprung men of genius in every walk of our varied life; men who have conceived of its ideals with singular clearness; and led enterprises with sprit & sagacity... They are not Jews in America, they are American citizens.

No thoughtful man ever came to the end of his life, and had time and a little space of calm from which to look back upon it, who did not know and acknowledge that it was what he had done unselfishly and for others, and nothing else, that satisfied him in the retrospect, and made him feel that he had played the man.

You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world.

A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying to do. We are trying to do a futile thing if we do not know where we came from or what we have been about.

We have begun a fight that it may be will take many a generation to complete...but you know that men are not put into this world to go the path of ease; they are put into this world to go the path of pain and struggle...We have given our lives to the enterprise, and that is richer and the moral is greater.

You are not here merely to making a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement.

You are here to enrich the world and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying.

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. . . . I want to achieve it through not dying.