Quotes About Heritage

You are the product of three billion years of evolutionary tweaks.

Britain still has the most reliably beautiful countryside of anywhere in the world. I would hate to be part of the generation that allowed that to be lost.

At last, some fourteen hundred years after the Romans withdrew, taking their hot baths, padded sofas, and central heating with them, the British were rediscovering the novel condition of being congenially situated.

Aborigines have the oldest continuously maintained culture on earth, and their art goes back to the very roots of it. Imagine if there were some people in France who could take you to the caves at Lascaux and explain in detail the significance of the paintings—

Sharkey was from Boston, the son of Lithuanian immigrants who had endowed him with magnificent strength and a name that no one could spell. It was variously rendered in official records as Zuhauskay

People in Philadelphia don't come from there; they come from "Fuhluffia.

A woman endows all her children with her mitochondria, but only her daughters have the mechanism to pass it onward to future generations.

La casa natale di Shakespeare, se non altro, sfuggì destino preparatogli dall'impresario P.T. Barnum, che negli anni Quaranta dell'Ottocento ebbe l'idea di spedirla negli Stati Uniti, montarla su ruote e mandarla in perpetua tournée per il Paese - prospettiva talmente allarmante che in Gran Bretagna ci si affrettò a raccogliere fondi per salvarla e trasformarla in museo e santuario.

That is the great thing about being a foreigner—that you get to spend your life with a whole new set of cultural attachments in addition to the ones you inherited at birth.

we are all now descended from a single mitochondrial ancestor – a woman who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago. You may have heard her referred to as Mitochondrial Eve. She is, in a sense, mother of us all.

we know more about how ancient Greeks and Romans sat or reclined than we do about the English of eight hundred years ago.

Among the genetic gifts the Neanderthals passed on to us, it seems, is red hair, bless them.

Saint Sulpice had only been granted protective status as a national treasure in 1994. But it was now officially a monument, in the fullest sense of the word: It marked a place where something happened which now was gone.

Slavery is a memory of something we cannot remember, and yet we cannot forget.

Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, and walk therein.'

No one dies so poor that he does not leave something behind.

Let us all be from somewhere.

The official erasure of any existence before enslavement – as if black Americans did not exist before the yolk and the chains and whip – has always created a passion for us. Black people need to find out. We have to find out Who We Are and Where We Come From.

A tradition that doesn't have to be an imitation of something but a continuation, a branching out more than anything. One would have to conceive of tradition as something living, something that's continually changing and enriching itself through that change.

All these twelve years of secondary school and university, Yura had studied classics and religion, legends and poets, the sciences of the past and of nature, as if it were all the family chronicle of his own house, his own genealogy.

Zhenya Luvers was born and grew up in Perm.

Most archivists don't like surprises. That's why we work in the past.

History is simply what's behind us.

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We don't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same. And if we don't do this, we will spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children's children, what it once was like in America to be free.