Quotes About Legacy

In the end there's nothing left except a pair of shoes and a bundle of old clothes.

Tragically, Solomon's

My wife, Kristen, and I often talk about raising our kids in such a way that they have as little as possible to unlearn later on in life.

We broke Batman's back. We killed Superman.

BEREA, KENTUCKY, 1939.

It was Abraham Lincoln who struck off the chains of black Americans, but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy's sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life. How true a part? Forty-three years later, a mere blink of history's eye, a black American, Barack Obama, was sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office.

He talked a lot about girls, too. His brother, Sam Houston Johnson, recalls that more than once, when he visited his brother at San Marcos, Lyndon, coming back into the room naked after a shower, would take his penis in his hand, and say: "Well, I've gotta take ol' Jumbo here and give him some exercise. I wonder who I'll fuck tonight.

Time would never cure it. Almost half a century later, when she was the only one of the nine Kennedy siblings still living, the author would ask Jean Kennedy Smith about her brother Bobby and his depression over Jack's death. "When did he come out of that?" she repeated, and then said, "I don't think he ever came out of that.

We of the South

Lyndon) Johnson created his own theater.

I would rather link my name indelibly with the living pulsing history of my country and not be forgotten entirely after a while than to have anything else on earth

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans"; "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty"—the phrases of Kennedy's inaugural

The author describes Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn as seldom at ease without a gavel in his hand.

People are always asking me why I chose Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson to write about. Well, I must say I never thought of my books as the stories of Moses or Johnson. I never had the slightest interest in writing the life of a great man. From the very start, I thought of writing biographies as a means of illuminating the times of the men I was writing about and the great forces that molded those times—particularly the force that is political power.

Many older physicians had gone to their graves calling Pasteur a liar, a fool, or worse---and without examining evidence which their "common sense" told them was impossible.

I believe that this hairless embryo with the aching, oversize brain case and the opposable thumb, this animal barely up from the apes, will endure --will endure longer than his home planet, will spread out to the other planets, to the stars, and beyond, carrying with him his honesty, his insatiable curiosity, his unlimited courage --and his noble essential decency. This I believe with all my heart.

in a matter of some generations all the stupid ones will die out and those with your discipline will inherit the Earth

It comes from exercising care in the choice of parents.

A generation which ignores history has no past—and no future.

But their refuge had been a dead end; all that inflexible old guard could do was to die and let younger minds, still limber, take over.

You don't pay back, you pay forward.

All men must die, it was their single common heritage. But a book need never die and should not be killed; books were the immortal part of man.

One must accept death, learn not to fear it, then never worry about it. 'Make Today Count!' as a friend whose days are numbered told me. Live in that spirit and when death comes, it will come as a welcome friend.

Maybe Jesus was right when he said that the meek shall inherit the earth—but they inherit very small plots, about six feet by three.