Quotes About Heritage

Calling such people "mulattoes," from the Spanish word meaning "mule," insinuated that blacks and whites, though related, were close to being separate species, as a mule is the offspring of a horse and a donkey.

Silence is not our heritage but our destiny; we live where we want to live.

The features that we take from our parents are the things that make us different. A big nose, thin lips, high forehead—all the things that the operation takes away.

The upshot of it has been that the spirit of the Past is now widely regarded amongst us as a purely immaterial force pumping a million times a day in the rose-pink heart of every true Irishman.

It is funny, but it strikes me that a person without anecdotes that they nurse while they live, and that survive them, are more likely to be utterly lost not only to history but the family following them. Of course this is the fate of most souls, reducing entire lives, no matter how vivid and wonderful, to those sad black names on withering family trees, with half a date dangling after and a question mark.

Poor people are forced to share their time and resources more than wealthy people are. And as a result, they live in closer communities. Inter-reliant poverty comes with its own stresses, and certainly isn't the American ideal, but its much closer to our evolutionary heritage than affluence. A wealthy person who has never had to rely on help and resources from his community is leading a privileged life that falls way outside more than a million years of human experience.

When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs," Benjamin Franklin wrote to a friend in 1753, "[yet] if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.

Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become European," a French émigré named Hector de Crèvecoeur lamented in 1782. "There must be in their social bond something singularly captivating and far superior to anything to be boasted of among us.

The mechanism seems simple: poor people are forced to share their time and resources more than wealthy people are, and as a result they live in closer communities. Inter-reliant poverty comes with its own stresses—and certainly isn't the American ideal—but it's much closer to our evolutionary heritage than affluence.

I would urge us to be not too certain of our accustomed ways of looking at Genesis, and to open ourselves to the wisdom of the God-bearing men of the past who have devoted so much intellectual effort to understanding the text of Genesis as it was meant to be understood. These Holy Fathers are our key to understanding Genesis.

My middle name, Tree, comes from your basic tree, a thing of such beauty to my mother that she made it part of my name.

Between the two of us, we've got a family tree rooted in Hell!

History belongs in the past; but understanding it is the duty of the present.

We carry with us the weight of the past, and because we do not have a finely developed sense of history and historicism, it is a past that is still alive in our present. We wear the dust of history on our foreheads, and the mud of the future on our feet.

We have no word for "Nation" in our language.

Kerala's Christians belong to the oldest Christian community in the world outside Palestine. And when St Thomas, one of Jesus's twelve apostles, brought Christianity to Kerala, it is said he was welcomed on shore by a flute-playing Jewish girl. St Thomas made converts among the high-born elite, the Namboodiri Brahmins, which meant there were Indians whose families had practised Christianity for far longer than the ancestors of any Briton could lay claim to.

there is nothing restrictive or self-limiting about the Indian identity it reasserts: it is large, eclectic and flexible, containing multitudes. I

Then too, and this was as romantic as the others, Briartree was the only thing she had ever really owned. Everything else had more or less been lent her; so it seemed. But this was hers, earned by blood, the only good she ever got from being kin to her mother.

They played the things Duff had learned while crouching under Bantam Street windows, the old songs that had been great before some of the boys were born, things never set down on paper but kept alive in places and in memories such as these.

Yes, I am Irish and Indian, which would be the coolest blend in the world if my parents were around to teach me how to be Irish and Indian. But they're not here and haven't been for years, so I'm not really Irish or Indian. I am a blank sky, a human solar eclipse.

My school and my tribe are so poor and sad that we have to study from the same dang books our parents studied from. That is absolutely the saddest thing in the world.

At the halfway point of any drunken night, there is a moment when an Indian realizes he cannot turn back toward tradition and that he has no map to guide him toward the future.

Well of course man. We Indians have lost everything. We lost our native land, we lost our languages, we lost our songs and dances. We lost each other. We only know how to lose and be lost.

I didn't literally kill Indians. We were supposed to make you give up being Indian. Your songs and stories and language and dancing. Everything. We weren't trying to kill Indian people. We were trying to kill Indian culture.