Quotes About Heritage

I picked up the Puerto Rican accent from my father, and my sister picked up my mother's very clear, concise, and slow Mexican-Spanish. So, when she does speak, she speaks with diction. She pronounces every word.

The death of a language. The word has the same kind of reluctant resonance as it has when we talk about the death of a person. And indeed, that's how it should be. For that's how it is. A language dies only when the last person who speaks it dies.

The people and the cultures of what is known as Africa are older than the word 'Africa.' According to most records, old and new, Africans are the oldest people on the face of the earth. The people now called Africans not only influenced the Greeks and the Romans, they influenced the early world before there was a place called Europe.

'Doo-wop' is a very special word for me. Because I grew up listening to my dad who, as a Fifties rock & roll head, loved doo-wop music.

The fact is that most 'Irish-Americans', in spite of dropping the word 'Irish' into half of all sentences, couldn't find Europe on an atlas, let alone Ireland.

Religion doesn't play any part in my life in terms of how I live my life. But I don't think I've ever gone through a day in my life without hearing someone say the word 'Jew' or saying it myself.

I grew up in an atmosphere where words were an integral part of culture.

Language and identity are so fundamentally intertwined. You peel back all the layers in terms of what we wear and what we eat and all the things that mark us, and in the end, what we have are our words.

It is my great good luck the words I use are English words, which means I live in a very old nation of open borders; a rich, deep, multi-layered, promiscuous universe, infused with Latin, German, French, Greek, Arabic and countless other tongues.

In other words, we are interested in the anatomical and mental characteristics of men living under the same biological, geographical, and social environment, and as determined by their past.

What does 'home' really mean? Is it merely geography, where you were born? Could it include straddling two continents and cultures? Or perhaps it's a place with a spiritual magnetism - a feeling toward a culture or people - that's tough to put into words?

The most appealing side-effect of Sri Lankan cricket from where I stand, shuffling words, has been linguistic.

Whenever I'd go anywhere with my dad - in his 1980 burgundy Dodge Ram - he'd always listen to mix tapes of country-music stars like Garth Brooks, Clint Black and Willie Nelson. Those were the first songs I ever learned the words to.

I feel a great kinship with my origins, even though I only learned a few words of Arabic.

I want to leave something behind. A blueprint. A work ethic. Something that my great-grandkids and their kids and their kids can see: This is where it started. Lineage. Intergenerational wealth. Things that are here forever. All that.

We've got nine generations of farmers in my family, in Warwickshire. And I do feel connected to being a farmer's son. There was a time when I didn't, when I rebelled against it, but there's certainly that sort of work ethic within me.

Our parents taught us to work hard and never forget our family roots, where we came from, and how much effort it took to get to where we are today.

Coming from immigrant Italian people, the one thing you do is work hard.

One of the things we tell ourselves as African-Americans is if we work hard, play by the rules, we do start back a little ways, but if we can be twice as good, somehow we can escape history and heritage and legacy.

Welsh is my mother tongue, and my children speak it. If you come and live in this community you'll work out pretty quickly that it's beneficial to learn the language, because if you're going to the pub or a cafe you need to be a part of the local life.

I want my great-granddaughter to have a fairly good understanding of the world in which I lived for 81 years and also the world before I came into it - all the way back a hundred thousand years, to the beginning of our species.

Yet there are thousands of Indigenous people searching for family members.

I am honored to receive the TED Prize, but it's not about me; it's about our field - and the thousands of men and women around the world, particularly in the Middle East, who are defending and protecting sites.

My children are mixed race. I want them to think: 'This is our country, our father's family has been here for thousands of years.'