Quotes About Heritage

Indeed, if you look around you on a bus or in a park or cafe or any crowded place, most of the people you see are very probably relatives. When someone boasts to you that he is descended from William the Conqueror or the Mayflower Pilgrims, you should answer at once: Me, too! In the most literal and fundamental sense we are all family.

The National Park Service actually has something of a tradition of making things extinct.

From that original colony sprang seven names that still feature on the landscape: Roanoke (which has the distinction of being the first Indian word borrowed by English settlers), Cape Fear, Cape Hatteras, the Chowan and Neuse Rivers, Chesapeake, and Virginia. (Previously, Virginia had been called Windgancon, meaning what gay clothes you wear - apparently what the locals had replied when an early reconnoitering party had asked the place's name.)

Britain has 450,000 listed buildings, 20,000 scheduled ancient monuments, twenty-six World Heritage Sites, 1,624 registered parks and gardens (that is, gardens and parks of historic significance), 600,000 known archaeological sites (and more being found every day; more being lost, too), 3,500 historic cemeteries, 70,000 war memorials, 4,000 sites of special scientific interest, 18,500 medieval churches, and 2,500 museums containing 170 million objects.

Since the dawn of time, several billion human (or humanlike) beings have lived, each contributing a little genetic variability to the total human stock.

I passed the time browsing in the windows of the many tourists shops that stand along it, reflecting on what a lot of things the Scots have given the world—kilts, bagpipes, tam-o'-shanters, tins of oatcakes, bright yellow sweaters with big diamond patterns, sacks of haggis—and how little anyone but a Scot would want them. Let

It's a slightly humbling thought that the genes you carry are immensely ancient and possibly—so far anyway—eternal. You will die and fade away, but your genes will go on and on so long as you and your descendants continue to produce offspring.

Norfolk is full of medieval churches—it has 659 of them, more per square mile than anywhere else in the world

In 1755, some seventy years after the last dodo's death, the director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford decided that the institution's stuffed dodo was becoming unpleasantly musty and ordered it tossed on a bonfire. This was a surprising decision as it was by this time the only dodo in existence, stuffed or otherwise. A passing employee, aghast, tried to rescue the bird but could save only its head and part of one limb.

In fact, if you are in a partnership now with someone from your own race and country, the chances are excellent that you are at some level related.

And it is surely astounding to reflect that not once in the three billion years since life began has your personal line of descent been broken.

There is almost no area of British life that isn't touched with a kind of genius for names.

Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so.

significance), 600,000 known archaeological sites (and more being found every day; more being lost, too), 3,500 historic cemeteries, 70,000 war memorials, 4,000 sites of special scientific interest, 18,500 medieval churches, and 2,500 museums containing 170 million objects. Having such a fund of richness means that it can sometimes be taken for granted to a shocking degree, but

An is indisputably correct before just four words beginning with 'h': hour, honest, honour and heir.

Mrs. Lindbergh declined all pleas to kiss or embrace her son, explaining that they came from "an undemonstrative Nordic race," which in her case was wholly untrue.

It's a slightly humbling thought that the genes you carry are immensely ancient and possibly—so far anyway—eternal. You will die and fade away, but your genes will go on and on so long as you and your descendants continue to produce offspring. And it is surely astounding to reflect that not once in the three billion years since life began has your personal line of descent been broken.

Almost all languages change. A rare exception is written Icelandic, which has changed so little that modern Icelanders can read sagas written a thousand years ago, and if Leif Ericson appeared on the streets of Reykjavik he could find his way around, allowing for certain difficulties over terms like airport and quarter-pound cheeseburger.

Carleton Coon of the University of Pennsylvania suggested that some modern races have different sources of origin, implying that some of us come from superior stock to others.

explaining how a bucolic, lightly populated county like Norfolk could produce twenty-seven thousand archaeological finds a year, more than any other county in England.

For the most part our fate and comfort—and even our eye color—are determined not by individual genes but by complexes of genes working in alliance.

Blenheim Palace, home of the Dukes of Marlborough, whose achievements over the last eleven generations could be inscribed with a Sharpie on the side of a peanut.

No country has given the world more incomparable literature per head of population than Ireland, and for that reason alone we might be excused a small, selfish celebration that English was the language of her greatest writers.

Nether Hambleton and Middle Hambleton