Quotes About Legacy

People die but their good and bad memories live

Today's story writes tomorrow's history

Mony a one for him maks mane,But nane sall ken where he is gane:O'er his white banes, when they are bare,The wind sall blaw for evermair.

"And what will ye leave to your ain mither dear,Edward, Edward?"

Oh, bury me out on the prairie,Where the coyotes may howl o'er my grave.

Dis manibus sacrum [Sacred to the departed spirit(s)].

Sit tibi terra levis [May the earth rest lightly on you].

Mors ultima ratio [Death is the final accounting].

These people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on old dry plates of sixty years ago... I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. Any they in turn seem to be aware of me

Inequality of outcome among today's generation is the source of the unfair advantage received by the next generation. If we are concerned about equality of opportunity tomorrow, we need to be concerned about inequality of outcome today.

From his mother, Philip inherited the Burgundian possessions. But a few years after Philip's marriage, his wife Joanna, daughter of Isabella and Ferdinand, inherited not only Castile, but Aragon, Sicily, Naples, America, and the Indies. So when Charles V came of age, he inherited from his father, his mother, and his grandparents a great empire. He was, at once, prince of the Netherlands, king of a united Spain, and emperor of Germany.

The moment you get to know your history, it is going to change you," he said. "We are encouraging our brothers and sisters from the U.S., from the Caribbean from Europe to come back to their Motherland Africa to get to know the culture … and whatever the ancestors went through."

When I die, I will decidedly not be regretting missed opportunities for a good time. My regrets will be more along the lines of a sad list of people hurt, people let down, assets wasted and advantages squandered.

Other things may change us, but we start and end with the family.

Well, Margaret Thatcher is perhaps the politician I have the greatest admiration for. I am reading her memoirs at the moment.

The British are special. The world knows it. In our innermost thoughts we know it. This is the greatest nation on earth. So it has been an honour to serve it. I give my thanks to you, the British people, for the times that I have succeeded, and my apologies to you for the times I have fallen short. But good luck.

If only Nixon could go to China, only Obama can end the self-memorialization obsession that is presidential libraries - by not building such a shrine.

But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.

It was hard to live through the early 1940s in France and not have the war be the center from which the rest of your life spiraled. Marie-Laure still cannot wear shoes that are too large, or smell a boiled turnip, without experiencing revulsion. Neither can she listen to lists of names. Soccer team rosters, citations at the end of journals, introductions at faculty meetings – always they seem to her some vestige of the prison lists that never contained her father's name.

That's what the gods do," he says, "they spin threads of ruin through the fabric of our lives, all to make a song for generations to come.

Every hour, Robert thinks, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying territory that seems to them entirely new. They push back the darkness; they scatter memories behind them like bread crumbs. The world is remade.

Our shadows are our histories. We drag them everywhere.

And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.

in time you will come to believe that there is nobility in being part of an enterprise that will outlast you.