Quotes About Heritage

The roll call of ancestors," he wrote, "includes no figures of outstanding importance in history." Rather, he said, what his book did provide was "a record of men and women who lived active, useful lives, and who gave to their nation and their communities the best that was in them.

All of us together were of a generation born of old country people who spoke English with an accent and prayed in another language, who drank red wine and cooked their food in the old country way, and peeled apples and pears after dinner.

Here, where we had done the most of our growing up, the old family home had been a fortress against the world. This is something that the children of immigrants all know.

Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.

No age lives entirely alone; every civilisation is formed not merely by its own achievements but by what it has inherited from the past. If these things are destroyed, we have lost a part of our past, and we shall be the poorer for it.

No age lives entirely alone; every civilisation is formed not merely by its own achievements but by what it has inherited from the past." — British Major Ronald Balfour of the Monuments Men

We must guard jealously all we have inherited from a long past, all we are capable of creating in a trying present, and all we are determined to preserve in a foreseeable future. Art

We do not want to destroy unnecessarily what men spent so much time and care and skill in making… [for] these examples of craftsmanship tell us so much about our ancestors.…

More than anything, the Nazis robbed families: of their livelihoods, their opportunities, their heirlooms, their mementos, of the things that identified them and defined them as human beings.

fifty million loved ones who never returned home from the war to rejoin their families or start one of their own; brilliant, creative contributions never made to our world because scientists, artists, and inventors lost their lives too early or were never born; cultures built over generations reduced to ashes

The inventory listed every work of art in the Western world—France, the Netherlands, Britain, and even the United States (which Kümmel said possessed nine such works)—that rightly belonged to Germany. Under Hitler's definition, this included every work taken from Germany since 1500, every work by any artist of German or Austrian descent, every work commissioned or completed in Germany, and every work deemed to have been executed in a Germanic style. The

It marked the first time an army fought a war while comprehensively attempting to mitigate cultural damage, and it was performed without adequate transportation, supplies, personnel, or historical precedent.

ancestors.… If these things are lost or broken or destroyed, we lose a valuable part of our knowledge about our forefathers. No age lives entirely alone; every civilisation is formed not merely by its own achievements but by what it has inherited from the past. If these things are destroyed, we have lost a part of our past, and we shall be the poorer for it. —British Monuments Man Ronald Balfour, draft lecture for soldiers, 1944 All

They are expressions of faith, and they stand for man's struggle to relate himself to his past and to his God. With

Non mi sono mai reso conto di che cosa significasse combattere in un museo finché non ho messo piede in Italia. - Kesselring

We must guard jealously all we have inherited from a long past, all we are capable of creating in a trying present, and all we are determined to preserve in a foreseeable future.

All around the world, tourist boards advertise trips to Britain with images of the great castles and cathedrals that occupy the commanding heights of our landscape. They seem timeless and typically English. It is rarely mentioned that they are predominately French - proud monuments to the invasion that signals the end of England's 'dark age'.

It could take a while — perhaps centuries. But the landscape would drip into their souls eventually. The English did not become Norman; the Normans became English.

It is a bad thing to forsake the old ways, and what is once lost can never quite be recovered." (Briggs

Vivere nei cuori che lasciamo dietro di noi non è morire».

Some of our greatest historical and artistic treasures we place with curators in museums; others we take for walks.

because an American can have a double-barreled last name but there is little practice for a triple-barreled one.

Social traditions exist because they enable a society to reproduce itself. Destroy them heedlessly and you remove the guarantee offered by one generation to the next.

Jack regarded himself as locked in a lifelong struggle with this establishment, on behalf of the Anglo-Saxon peasantry whose birthright had been stolen a thousand years earlier by the Norman knights.