Quotes About Heritage

All we have of freedom All we use or know This our fathers bought for us Long and long ago

If any question why we died, tell them, because our fathers lied.

If a man brings a good mind to what he reads he may become, as it were, the spiritual descendant to some extent of great men, and this link, this spiritual hereditary tie, may help to just kick the beam in the right direction at a vital crisis; or may keep him from drifting through the long slack times when, so to speak, we are only fielding and no balls are coming our way.

Dobrý lov vám vÅ¡em, kdo jste z mé krve

Rikki-tikki's mother (she used to live in the general's house at Segowlee) had carefully told Rikki what to do if ever he came across white men.

Of all the trees that grow so fair Old England to adorn, Greater are none beneath the Sun Than Oak, and Ash and Thorn.

Indeed, indeed, I might have remembered that the children of kings are men from the beginning.

Father took race to be the central and inescapable fact of American life and character, and thus he did not apologize for its being the central fact of his own life and character.

Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it: they must seek out its old virtues, and bring them back into the light.

The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accomodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed in his community. From the moment of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behavior.

What does your friend Abdullah mean, they were here before us? Abraham was here more than four thousand years ago. Thousands of years before Mohammed, who died, if I remember right, in A.D. 632.

Being half, I am evidence that race, too, will become relic. Eventually we're all going to be brown, sort of. Some days, when I'm reeling grand, I feel brand-new - like a prototype. Back in the olden days, my dad's ancestors got stuck behind the Alps and my mom's on the east side of the Urals. Now, oddly, I straddle this blessed, ever-shrinking world.

Do not build your homes below this point! Some of the warning stones were more than six centuries old. A few had been shifted by the tsunami, but most had remained safely out of its reach. "They're the voices of our ancestors," said the mayor of a town, destroyed

That's what I like so much about old libraries - they smell the way we'd like to imagine the past.

The Irish 'peasant' is the child of time. He is its guardian and its slave. He will preserve for centuries dull and foolish habits that those who neither love nor fear time or change will quickly cast aside; but he will also preserve dear, ancient habits that like wine and ivory grow more beautiful and precious with age, all jumbled with the useless lumber in that dusty cockloft which is his ancestral mind.

We are not responsible for the mistakes committed by our previous generations. However, if we equate ourselves with them and regard ourselves as their heirs, we must then be ready to also share the responsibility for their mistakes.

There is only one true legitimacy, and it's bestowed by love, not male lineage.

Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places.

Why, alone of all the more-than-five-hundred-million, should I have to bear the burden of history?

Maybe I should go home. I miss Bombay. But the Bombay I miss isn't there to go home to anymore. This is who we are. We sail away from the place we love and then because we aren't there to love it people go with axes and burning torches and smash and burn and then we say, Oh, too sad. But we abandoned it, left it to our barbarian successors to destroy.

You observe … that when it's time to unleash a few insults, a man will always choose his mother tongue.

He wanted, for example, to investigate why one should hold fast to a religion not because it was true but because it was the faith of one's fathers. Was faith not faith but simple family habit? Maybe there was no true religion but only this eternal handing down. And error could be handed down as easily as virtue. Was faith no more than an error of our ancestors?

Half-Christian, half-Jewish, a 'cathjew nut'

many of us, as immigrants—or our parents or our grandparents—had chosen to leave our pasts behind just as the Goldens were now choosing, encouraging our children to speak English, not the old language from the old country: to speak, dress, act, be American.