Quotes About Legacy

Power," as John Adams had written, "always thinks it has a great soul.

A visit to the Tunisian battlefields tells a bit more. For more than half a century, time and weather have purified the ground at El Guettar and Kasserine and Longstop. But the slit trenches remain, and rusty C-ration cans, and shell fragments scattered like seed corn. The lay of the land also remains—the vulnerable low ground, the superior high ground: incessant reminders of how, in battle, topography is fate.

Where, precisely, was Private Anthony N. Marfione when he died on December 24, 1942? What were the last conscious thoughts of Lieutenant Hill P. Cooper before he left this earth on April 9, 1943? Was Sergeant Harry K. Midkiff alone when he crossed over on November 25, 1942, or did some good soul squeeze his hand and caress his forehead? The dead resist such intimacy. The closer we try to approach, the farther they draw back, like rainbows or mirages.

In less than three years he would be the most celebrated American battle captain of the twentieth century, a man whose name—like those of Jeb Stuart and Phil Sheridan—evoked the dash and brio of a cavalry charge. In less than four years he would be dead, and the New York Times obituary would offer the perfect epitaph: "He was not a man of peace.

May the earth lie lightly on his bones.

Yet the war and all that the war contained—nobility, villainy, immeasurable sorrow—is certain to live on even after the last old soldier has gone to his grave. May the earth lie lightly on his bones.

A French writer once observed that, "in the new colonies, the Spanish start by building a church, the English a tavern, and the French a fort.

USS Henry Gibbons.

I think it may be fine to live in the past if that is where your people have all disappeared to - if that is a place where things still make some kind of sense to you.

Yet how lovely, to think that a person can live forever as long as one last bird sings in the dying light of one more day.

It has the pictures of my people, the books I love, the music I hear. I guess it is really just a wooden box to hold a life in, for days or decades, until someone else takes it over.

They named him James, for Charlie's daddy. In the South, you do not have to love someone a real whole lot to name a child for them. It is just something you do, naming the first boy after his grandfather.

He liked the cemetery. He told me once that it was where a man his age had to go to talk to anybody who could appreciate him.

You're the guy they depend on when things go bad, when they need somebody to pull them out of the ditch, or clear the road with your chainsaw, or jump them off in the middle of the night. "People will line up to say this stuff over you, like they did Grandpa," I said. My kin could recall how they could see the headlights coming for miles down those twisting mountain roads, the night he left this earth.

This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven.

We are good at stories. We hoard them, like an old woman in a room full of boxes, but now and then we pull out our best, and spread them out. We talk of the bad years when the cotton didn't open, and the day my cousin Wanda was washed in the Blood. We buff our beloved ancestors until they are smooth of sin, and give our scoundrels a hard shake, although sometimes we can't remember exactly which is who.

I wrote and produced millions and millions of selling records, so my publishing company alone was worth millions of dollars. I didn't have to work anymore in life because when the rappers started sampling... I'm the most sampled artist in history.

I imagined him then walking the few feet to the hilltop, where he had bedded down so many times next his life partner, and lying down to rest. As he slowly drifted off to sleep, I would like to think that the scent from that tree triggered a picture. If so, then the last thing in 21's mind as he lost consciousness for the final time was an image of 42.

How did Nixonland end? It has not ended yet.

I stand before you as the governor of Texas but also stand before you the son of two tenant farmers. Ray Perry who came home after 35 bombing missions over Europe to work his little corner of land out there and Amelia who made sure that my sister Milla and I had everything that we needed, included hand sewing my clothes until I went off to college.

people like John Wooden, maybe the greatest coach of all time in any sport, or Mike Krzyzewski, who is the modern-day John Wooden, sustain success for so long. You can readily see their humility.

You weren't put on earth to be remembered. You were put here to prepare for eternity.

Here lies Ricky Gervais: He had a laugh then found a lump.

I always wanted to be a father. I have a beautiful relationship with my dad and beautiful memories. I always knew I was going to have a family.