Quotes About Heritage

biological mum

Birth of a Nation

I regretted I was not the head of a clan; however, though not possessed of such an hereditary advantage, I would always endeavour to make my tenants follow me.

The larger the pile of rubble you leave behind, the larger your place in the historical record!

Tradition, meaning, and relevance

Perhaps that is why we love life so much, Anjin-san. You see, we have to. Death is part of our air and sea and earth. You should know, Anjin-san, in this Land of Tears, death is our heritage.

My day has been too long. In the morning I saw the sons of the Unamis happy and strong; and yet, before the sun has come, have I lived to see the last warrior of the wise race of the Mohicans.

The United States is the only country with a known birthday.

A person in search of his ancestors naturally likes to believe the best of them, and the best in terms of contemporary standards. Where genealogical facts are few, and these located in the remote past, reconstruction of family history is often more imaginative than correct.

It was not, as some suggest, Calvinism that made Scots hard: it was Scottish character that made Calvinism, already congenial to the national spirit, even more rock-ribbed than its Genevan counterpart.

Thousands of the Scotch-Irish began their New World careers as servants.

The culture of good place-making, like the culture of farming, or agriculture, is a body of knowledge and acquired skills. It is not bred in the bone, and if it is not transmitted from one generation to the next, it is lost.

The Virginians of the mountains, and of the broad valley of the Shenandoah River just beyond, were a different breed.

Fin Gall - Gaelic term for Vikings of Norwegian descent. It means White Strangers.

As he shook hands with Grant's military secretary Ely Parker, a Seneca Indian, Lee stared a moment at Parker's dark features and said, "I am glad to see one real American here." Parker responded, "We are all Americans."39

Statues of Confederate soldiers

People find different ways of keeping the ones they loved among the living, he said cautiously. Children. Memories. The names of things.

We're Englishmen. For us the road always goes home again.

OUR history begins before we are born. We represent the hereditary influences of our race, and our ancestors virtually live in us.

Properly speaking, a culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition.

Titles, then, point backward in time. They have their origin in an unrepeatable past.

Any attempt to vary from the past in such a way as to cut the past off, causing it to be forgotten, has little cultural importance.

It is high time Americans grew accustomed to our traditions.

The past is the past. It's now up to us to sustain our own culture. We only lose what we fail to nurture.