Quotes About Inheritance

help you realize that your present will someday be someone else's past.

Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew…

Consequently—since there is a natural selection of institutions and ideas as well as of organisms and groups—the passage from hunting to agriculture brought a change from tribal property to family property; the most economical unit of production became the unit of ownership. As the family took on more and more a patriarchal form, with authority centralized in the oldest male, property became increasingly individualized, and personal bequest arose.

Inheritance added superior opportunity to superior possessions, and stratified once homogeneous societies into a maze of classes and castes.

The spirit of property doubles a man's strength. It is certain that the possessor of an estate will cultivate his own inheritance better than that of another.

Greece did not begin civilization—it inherited far more civilization than it began; it was the spoiled heir of three millenniums of arts and sciences brought to its cities from the Near East by the fortunes of trade and war. In studying and honoring the Near East we shall be acknowledging a debt long due to the real founders of European and American civilization.

Education is the reason why we behave like human beings. We are hardly born human. We are born ridiculous, malodorous animals. We become human. We have humanity thrust upon us through the hundred channels whereby the past pours down into the present that mental and cultural inheritance--whose preservation, emulation, and transmission places mankind today, with all of its defectives and illiterates, on a higher plain than any generation has ever reached before.

Cyrus and Darius created Persia, Xerxes inherited it, his successors destroyed it.

todos nacemos sin libertad y desiguales: sujetos a nuestra herencia física y psicológica y a las costumbres y tradiciones de nuestro grupo; conformados de forma distinta en cuanto a salud y fuerza, capacidad mental y cualidades de carácter.

The Ruins of Time builds Mansions in Eternity. (Letter to William Hayley, on the occasion of the death of Hayley's son)

All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born.

The past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.

I don't mean a 1905 Republican---I don't know what his Tennessee politics were, or if he had any---I mean a 1961 Republican. He was more: he was a Conservative. Like this: a Republican is a mad who made his money; a Liberal is a man who inherited his; a Democrat is a barefooted Liberal in a cross-country race; a Conservative is a Republican who has learned to read and write.

When he saw the River again he knew it at once. He should have; it was now ineradicably a part of his past, his life; it would be a part of what he would bequeath, if that were in store for him.

But I didn't need to see him because he was there, he would always be there; maybe what Druscilla meant by his dream was not something which he possessed but something which he had bequeathed us which we could never forget, which would even assume the corporeal shape of him whenever any of us, black or white, closed our eyes.

And there's this twelve thousand dollars item for books. -That supposed to be twelve hundred, the twelve thousand is for paper. towels. Besides there is already that bequest for the library. -Did it say books in so many words? No. It's just a bequest for the library. -Use it for pegboard. You need pegboard in a library. Books you don't know what you're getting into.

Something she'd gotten from Burton

Your father is dying. Drat! said the Prince, That means I shall have to get married.

I am not the Dread Pirate Roberts, he said, my name is Ryan. I inherited this ship from the previous Dread Pirate Roberts...

But we have inherited a vast number of social ills which never came from Nature. They are the complicated products of all the tinkering, muddling, and blundering of social doctors in the past. These products of social quackery are now buttressed by habit, fashion, prejudice, platitudinarian thinking, and new quackery in political economy and social science. It

History is a ribbon, always unfurling. History is a journey. And as we continue our journey, we think of those who traveled before us . . .

To explain the nineteenth century, that is, the contemporary world, one had to consider first what it had been bequeathed from ancient times. Three things, said Chamberlain: Greek philosophy and art, Roman law and the personality of Christ.

He didn't know what if anything it was his mother got from his father's company.

their tendency to dutifully follow a script written before they were born.