Quotes About Legacy

As mudanças na condição humana são incertas e frequentes. Muitos aos quais a fortuna concedeu favores podem descobrir que, no passado, as condições de sua família nada tinham de prósperas; e muitos que hoje estão na obscuridade procedem de ancestrais afortunados e nobres.

Later on Washington's childless state helped him to assume the title of Father of His Country. That he wasn't a biological father made it easier for him to be the allegorical father of a nation. It also retired any fears, when he was president, that the nation might revert to a monarchy, because he could have no interest in a hereditary crown.

I want to see Hamilton.

Rockefeller molded his house for his own use, not to awe strangers.

William's imprudent decision figured importantly in the enormous disparity in wealth that developed between the two brothers.

Hamilton's achievements were never matched because he was present at the government's inception, when he could draw freely on a blank slate. If Washington was the father of the country and Madison the father of the Constitution, then Alexander Hamilton was surely the father of the American government.

In April 1803, President Jefferson reached the zenith of his popularity with the Louisiana Purchase. For a mere pittance of fifteen million dollars, the United States acquired 828,000 square miles between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, doubling American territory

And he had inherited the chief American bank in London.

Pierpont always acknowledged his debt to his father—he never pretended to be self-made

there will never be another bank as powerful, mysterious, or opulent as the old House of Morgan.

Even in death, Peabody managed to foster Anglo-American harmony.

Rockefeller handled people adroitly and wasn't the cold curmudgeon of later myth.

but he is kept in check by the Drexels.

Whatever his own discomfort, Rockefeller made an excellent impression.

As a philanthropist, Rockefeller chose to cultivate a wise detachment from his creations and told Harper that he saw himself as a silent partner in the operation

For the rest of her life, Eliza rotated among the homes of her five children, who provided her with more security than she had ever known with her prodigal husband.

With an exalted sense of his place in history, he viewed himself as a potential savior of the republic. He once told a friend, "Perhaps my sensibility is the effect of an exaggerated estimate of my services to the U[nited] States, but on such a subject every man will judge for himself.

Yet Big Bill never entirely lost touch with his Rockefeller family.

Eliza never lost her temper, never raised her voice, never scolded anyone—a style of understated authority that John inherited.

Julia would gladly have stayed for one more term and had no qualms about scrapping George Washington's precedent. "Oh, Ulys! was that kind to me?" she protested. "Was it just to me?" "Well," he replied, "I do not want to be here another four years. I do not think I could stand it." Rather than feel sympathy for her husband's plight as a profoundly overburdened president, Julia chose to feel "deeply injured.

That, I decided, was what it meant to be a slave: your past didn't matter, in the present you were invisible and you had no claim on the future.

children will be able to tell than the story we have told? Surely that is the greatest contribution of science to civilization: to ensure that the greatest books are not those of the past, but of the future.

I wish my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me;

I reflected that, when dynamic, positive change happens, it is usually because of generational commitment to social transformation.