Quotes About Heritage

Successful people don't do it alone. Where they come from matters. They're products of particular places and environments.

Greenberg] knew that cultural legacies matter--that they are powerful and pervasive and that they persist, long after their original usefulness has passed. But he didn't assume that legacies are an indelible part of who we are. He believed that if the Koreans were honest about where they came from and were willing to confront those aspects of their heritage that did not suit the aviation world, they could change.

The culture of honor hypothesis says that it matters where you're from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up, but in terms of where your great-grandparents and great-great-great-grandparents grew up. That is a strange and powerful fact. It's just the beginning, though, because upon closer examination, cultural legacies turn out to be even stranger and more powerful than that.

Farkas's Jewish family trees go on for pages, each virtually identical to the one before, until the conclusion becomes inescapable: Jewish doctors and lawyers did not become professionals in spite of their humble origins. They became professionals because of their humble origins.

Why is the fact that each of us comes from a culture with its own distinctive mix of strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and predispositions, so difficult to acknowledge? Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from—and when we ignore that fact, planes crash.

the palace of the Saggese family, once the great landowner of those parts. An archway

It's not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.

Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives.

Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from —

La herencia cultural importa; y una vez que hemos visto el sorprendente efecto de cosas tales como la distancia al poder o el hecho de poder expresarse en un cuarto de segundo en lugar de invertir un tercio o una mitad, no es difícil preguntarse qué otras herencias culturales tendrán un impacto sobre nuestras tareas intelectuales del siglo XXI.

My great-great-great-grandmother

we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine. It's not

fractious relationships between the English and Germans and Italians in those years—that Roseto stayed strictly for Rosetans. If you had wandered up and down the streets of Roseto in Pennsylvania in the first few decades after 1900, you would have heard only Italian, and not just any Italian but the precise southern

Roseto Valfortore lies one hundred miles southeast of Rome in the Apennine foothills of the Italian province of Foggia. In the style of medieval villages

They had to look beyond the individual. They had to understand the culture he or she was a part of, and who their friends and families were, and what town their families came from. They had to appreciate the idea that the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.

Their world—their culture and generation and family history—gave them the greatest of opportunities.

My great-great-great-grandmother was bought at Alligator Pond.

Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from—and when we ignore that fact, planes crash.

We didn't land on plymouth rock, Plymouth rock landed on us.

Success has many fathers.

Success is not what you leave to but what you leave behind

If there ever comes a time that you forget where you came from, you've gone too far.

If these United States can be called a body, then Kentucky can be called its heart.

I take with me Kentucky, embedded in my brain and heart, in my flesh and bone and blood. Since I am Kentucky, and Kentucky is part of me.