Quotes About Heritage

The possibility that empathy is part of our primate heritage ought to makes us happy, but we're not in the habit of embracing our nature. When people commit genocide, we call them "animals". But when they give to the poor, we praise them for being "humane". We like to claim the latter behavior for ourselves.

One avoids Creolisms. Some families completely forbid Creole and mothers ridicule their children for speaking it.

To speak...means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.

It is the white man who creates the Negro. But it is the negro who creates negritude.

21?At the last school prize-giving ceremony in Dakar, the president of the Republic of Senegal, Léopold Senghor, announced that negritude should be included in the school curriculum. If this decision is an exercise in cultural history, it can only be approved. But if it is a matter of shaping black consciousness it is simply turning one's back on history which has already noted the fact that most "Negroes" have ceased to exist.

To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.

For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.

I don't have to look up my family tree, because I know that I'm the sap.

I don't have to look up my family tree, because I know that I'm the sap.

Grandparents are both our past and our future. In some ways they are what has gone before, and in others they are what we will become.

We want to raise our children so that they can take a sense of pleasure in both their own heritage and the diversity of others.

Who was I to dare to talk to him? In which of Europe's ghettos had my ancestor been huddled when Frederick von Hohenstaufen gave Anno von Hohenfels his bejewelled hand?

They were all copies of originals made by the British Admiralty, and the best in the world.

Faith of our fathers! holy faith!We will be true to thee till death.

The map that said this is where we are. This is who we've always been. This place of yours that will always be here. This place you can always call home.

Like many my age, I have left for the mainland. Who is left to watch for the weather and to judge the tides, to buain the peats and gather the crotal, to walk up the high hill and run over the white sand? Here are the faces that know. They know that while I may perceive opportunity to lie further and further away, my heart and soul will always be that of a Hearach.

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

I grew up in a very old-fashioned Roman Catholic, Italian-Irish family in Philly.

Customs have no reason; they simply are.

The monuments of Man are worthless if no one is left to carry their meaning.

Grandpa mentioned another endangered artifact, in Brazil.

You get to choose who you are. Legacy, memories of the past, can serve us well. But we cannot let them define us. When heritage becomes a box instead of an inspiration, it has gone too far.

All people must accept that we have the potential to do terrible things. It is part of seeing our place in the universe, our heritage, and our natures. But in that acceptance we gain strength, for potential can be refused. Any hero who could have been a monster is more heroic for the choices he or she made to walk another road.

When heritage becomes a box instead of an inspiration, it has gone too far.