Quotes About Legacy

There was something so heavy about the burden of history, of the past.

What you have to decide," Kristy said to me, leaning forward, "is how you want your life to be. If your forever was ending tomorrow, would this be how you'd want to have spent it?

You'll never know what your mother went through.

Robert Todd Lincoln, a.k.a. Jinxy McDeath.

Winthrop and his shipmates and their children and their children's children just wrote their own books and pretty much kept their noses in them up until the day God created the Red Sox.

quoting Kipling, I never got over the wonder of a people who, having extirpated the aboriginals of their continent more completely than any modern race had ever done, honestly believed they were a godly little New England community, setting examples to mankind.

The newly dubbed General Lafayette was only nineteen years old. Considering Independence Hall was also where the founders calculated that a slave equals three-fifths of a person and cooked up an electoral college that lets Florida and Ohio pick our presidents, making an adolescent who barely spoke English a major general at the age I got hired to run the cash register at a Portland pizza joint was not the worst decision ever made there.

Let us thank God for having given us such ancestors; and let each successive generation thank Him, not less fervently, for being one step further from them in the march of ages.

In death, you get upgraded into a saint no matter how much people hated you in life.

Of course Americans celebrate Independence Day as opposed to Yorktown Day. Who wants to barbecue a hot dog and ponder how we owe our independence to the French navy? Who wants to twirl sparklers and dwell on how the French government's expenditures in America contributed to the bankruptcy that sparked the French Revolution that would send Rochambeau to prison, Lafayette into exile (then prison), and our benefactor His Most Christian Majesty Louis XVI to the guillotine.

Before the verb "to electrocute" came to define death by electricity, Edison advocated that the verb be named for his nemesis, that a person who had been electrocuted would have been westinghoused instead. I bet Westinghouse came up with some possible definitions of what it meant to be edisoned himself.

we all still bask in the glow and the warmth of Mr. Franklin's rising sun." Sounds good.

Besides the money and land, Lafayette inherited a six-foot-tall hole in his heart that only a father figure like George Washington could fill.

the nineteenth-century monument in front of the Monmouth County courthouse in Freehold, New Jersey

More than anyone on earth, Lafayette was mournfully aware of the uniqueness of the American republic he had fought to build.

The flesh would shrink and go, the blood would dry, but no one believes in his mind of minds or heart of hearts that the pictures do stop.

To him, perpetual thought of death was a sin. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.

The good die young, but I have been spared to build myself up so that I may end my life as good as gold. The senior dead will be proud of me.... I will join the Y.M.C.A. of the immortals. Only, in this very hour, I may be missing eternity.

Death is good for some people.

Death discredits. Survival is the whole success. The voice of the dead goes away. There isn't any memory. The power that's established fills the earth and destiny is whatever survives, so whatever is is right.

He chased ruin and death even harder than he had chased women. He blew his talent and his health and reached home, the grave, in a dusty slide.

What did Danton lose his head for, or why was there a Napoleon, if it wasn't to make a nobility of us all?

Što se ti?e njegovog odnosa prema mrtvima, taj je zaista bio vrlo loš. On je doista vjerovao da mrtvima treba prepustiti da pokopaju svoje mrtve. I da je život samo onda život kada se nedvosmisleno shva?a kao umiranje.

He was a splendid old man, only partly fraudulent, and what more can you ask of anyone?