Quotes About Legacy

Now that I have taken my revenge on my enemy and have made a name for myself, I can lay down my swords, bows, and arrows.

We live in an age in which there is no heroic death.

Time is what matters. As time goes by, you and I will be carried inexorably into the mainstream of our period, even though we're unaware of what it is. And later, when they say that young men in the early Taisho era thought, dressed, talked, in such and such a way, they'll be talking about you and me. We'll all be lumped together…. In a few decades, people will see you and the people you despise as one and the same, a single entity.

You can do whatever you want. Besides the works of the Hikaris…seem to be destined to end up with the Niwas.

Many powerful works were created by the Hikari clan. My clan. But in creating those works of art, they also created a curse. That curse plagues even me. Maybe I want to test that curse…

Go & tell your drinking buddies & psychoanalyst your neighbor has risen from the ashes. I wonder if I should tell you about the love letters hidden behind the doorjamb. This house still stands among my lavender flowers. Tell your inheritors to think of me when they smile up at the sky.

The best that we can hope for in this life is that we shall not have sons and grandsons of whom we need to be ashamed.

An empire that cannot sustain a blow and remain standing is not really an empire.

God is dead – it's just taking a while to get rid of the body.

Due to this dualist legacy, every journey on which we doubt the conventions and deals of the mundane world and walk towards an unknown destination is called 'a spiritual journey'. Such journeys are fundamentally different from religions, because religions seek to cement the worldly order whereas spirituality seeks to escape it.

The cold hand of the past emerges from the grave of our ancestors, grips us by the neck and directs our gaze towards a single future. We

Such vicious circles can go on for centuries and even millennia, perpetuating an imagined hierarchy that sprang from a chance historical occurrence. Unjust discrimination often gets worse, not better, with time. Money comes to money, and poverty to poverty. Education comes to education, and ignorance to ignorance. Those once victimised by history are likely to be victimised yet again. And those whom history has privileged are more likely to be privileged again.

other organisms are doing quite well. Rats and cockroaches, for example, are in their heyday. These tenacious creatures would probably creep out from beneath the smoking rubble of a nuclear Armageddon, ready and able to spread their DNA. Perhaps 65 million years from now, intelligent rats will look back gratefully on the decimation wrought by humankind, just as we today can thank that dinosaur-busting asteroid.

Consider a resident of Berlin, born in 1900 and living to the ripe age of one hundred. She spent her childhood in the Hohenzollern Empire of William II; her adult years in the Weimar Republic, the Nazi Third Reich and Communist East Germany; and she died a citizen of a democratic and reunified Germany. She had managed to be a part of five very different sociopolitical systems, though her DNA remained exactly the same.

Studying history aims to loosen the grip of the past. It enables us to turn our head this way and that, and begin to notice possibilities that our ancestors could not imagine, or didn't want us to imagine.

To study history means to watch the spinning and unravelling of these webs, and to realise that what seems to people in one age the most important thing in life becomes utterly meaningless to their descendants.

An empire that cannot sustain a blow and remain standing is not really an empire. Yet

It is doubtful whether Homo sapiens will still be around a thousand years from now, so 2 million years is really out of our league.

Perhaps 65 million years from now, intelligent rats will look back gratefully on the decimation wrought by humankind, just as we today can thank that dinosaur-busting asteroid.

Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology.

Like the elite of ancient Egypt, most people in most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids. Only the names, shapes and sizes of these pyramids change from one culture to the other.

In the century following the Cook expedition, the most fertile lands of Australia and New Zealand were taken from their previous inhabitants by European settlers. The native population dropped by up to 90 per cent and the survivors were subjected to a harsh regime of racial oppression. For the Aborigines of Australia and the Maoris of New Zealand, the Cook expedition was the beginning of a catastrophe from which they have never recovered.

The new Romanian elite that controls the country to this day is composed mostly of former communists and their families.

What, exactly, happens to a Communist after he or she dies?