Quotes About Legacy

Whatever we do or fail to do will influence the course of history.

This is the legacy of the African continent to the nations of the world," George James says in Stolen Legacy, which "laid the foundations of modern progress." Later, the Greeks and other whites managed to steal all these civilized skills from the African man, leaving him in darkness. When he heard this, the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger asked skeptically, "How does one lose knowledge by sharing it?

The nineteenth century faced an ambiguous legacy. On one side was civil society theory, teaching that human society makes men better. On the other stood Rousseau, proclaiming that it makes them worse.

The Cynics, too, had Socratic roots. Their founder, Antisthenes, had known both Socrates and Plato personally

This point is fundamental for Plato and his legacy to the West. Knowledge is always the prerequisite of virtue, just as ignorance always leads us into evil. For Plato and all Platonists who come after him, grasping a standard of perfection is what we need in order to be virtuous and ultimately happy.

two-thousand-year struggle for the soul of Western civilization, which today extends to all civilizations: a struggle born from an act of rebellion. It came around 360 BCE, when the young Aristotle, son of the court doctor of the Macedonian kings, turned against the ideas of his famous teacher, Plato of Athens, and set out to create a school of his own.

You are only remembered and become famous because of your mistakes. —DOUGLAS MACARTHUR

That cannot be said of William of Ockham. Born a few years before Bacon's death in 1294, he carried the Aristotelian legacy of the Oxford Franciscans into direct conflict with the Church's most powerful figure, the pope himself.

that famous motto that sits above Christopher Wren's tomb at Westminster Abbey... "If you seek his monument, look around you" - meaning London, 17th Century London. I think it's a motto that very much applies to the Scottish contribution to the modern World: that if you seek their monument, the Scots' monument, look around you.

The lesson Scott taught the modern world was that the past does not have to die or vanish: it can live on, in a nation's memory, and help to nourish its posterity.

Good laws will make good men, and the best laws are forged not in the heat of crisis or the give-and-take of ordinary political debate, where men's appetites take over, but through the exercise of knowledge and reason. Self-interest must learn to yield to the common interest; and men must be united if they are to be free. Taken together, that remains Plato's most important political legacy.

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, might imply. Contemporaries viewed him with awe as the last Roman. We can think of him as the first medieval man, and the man who reintroduced Aristotle to the West. Boethius was born fifty years after Augustine's death

Aristotle, we must remember, was a doctor's son.

Thanks to Plato, Socrates's notion of the individual rational soul would become an integral part of Western thinking for the next two thousand years.

There is no doubt that the first requirement for a composer is to be dead.

De hoop van de ouden vergaat in rook zodat hun jongen wolken hebben om hun eigen luchtkastelen op te bouwen.

Civilizations do not then "fall"—they are merely replaced by another culture, which is the product of the new population.

Woe unto the defeated, whom history treads into the dust.

History had a slow pulse; man counted in years, history in generations

Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.

The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.

A man can't go out the way he came in… a man has got to add up to something!

Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!

History is written by the future, and therefore distorted at its start.