Quotes About Legacy

For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.

For in the end, it is all about memory, its sources and its magnitude, and, of course, its consequences.

Only the guilty are guilty. Their children are not.

I went on to the balcony, lit a cigarette, and looked at the museum, wondering whether it would still be there in a thousand years. When would it not be there anymore?

Okay. Now, don't let any of this lower your mirth index. Think of Tamerlane." My grandfather used to comfort my mother, during her childhood, by reminding her that they might have been related to Tamerlane. "Okay," I said, though I had never seen how Tamerlane helped anything. "Remember, you have the best heart and mind, and whatever you do is right. Bye-bye, my sweet. Don't forget the fruit group.

Respect for the dead comes second to respect for the living, and I believe no man's demise exempts him from culpability.

The computer on the desk of the student in school knows no history. It is not like a book, worn at the edges by human hands. No little child has written a note in it, long ago. It will not be passed down to the children of the children who use it. Its "meaning" is that there is no enduring meaning.

On language—from the mother tongue came our father's sins.

Had a long talk to the Chinese First Secretary at the embassy a very charming man called Liao Dong and said how much I admired Mao Tse tung or Zedong, the greatest man of the twentieth century. He said that I couldn't admire Mao more than he did. I asked him how Mao was viewed now. He said Mao was 70 per cent right and 30 per cent wrong; the Cultural Revolution didn't work. He said he had been named after Mao it was amusing.

I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.

the white stain of chalk mixed with the clay topsoil zigzagging across the freshly-turned earth, the tell-tale marks of the German trenches from which ***** had been enfiladed. Fifty ploughings and fifty harvests had failed to erase those marks, so maybe they were etched into the land for all time, just like the spadework of the ancient peoples which the archaeologists studied with such fervour.

For so long, Lebanon had wrestled with the rudimentary questions of identity: whether its inhabitants were Arabs first or Lebanese above all, whether they belonged to East or West, whether they were bound to a destiny that stretched far beyond its borders—the Muslim world, for instance—or were part of a legacy as particular as the history of ancient Phoenicia.

We have lost the splendors our ancestors created, and we go elsewhere. People are reminded of that every day here, where an older world, still visible on every corner, fails to hide its superior ways.

Narcissists are bound to feel that their own death is the end of everything that really matters.

If while alive you hurt or disappoint people you love, there's no use continuing such behavior when you're dead.

Was your old man in the war?" "He was in the air force. He built runways." "The fucking air farce. He ever tell you about it? Did he live?" "Yes, he lived. He spoke once about Vietnam." "If he only spoke about it once, he wasn't lying.

In these days a man is nobody unless his biography is kept so far posted up that it may be ready for the national breakfast-table on the morning after his demise.

A fellow oughtn't to let his family property go to pieces.

Oblivion is the rule and fame the exception, of humanity.

Although human life is priceless, we always act as if something had an even greater price than life…. But what is that something?

He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man.

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us.

Tante pagine sublimi sono state date alle fiamme, mentre questi documenti schifosi stanno ancora qui nella mia biblioteca.

il y a ce qui subsiste d'une usine dont le cœur atomique est en feu depuis trois cent soixante-deux ans.