Quotes About Heritage

When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.

Up men to your posts! Don't forget today that you are from old Virginia.

I vividly remember the stories my grandfather told me about the carnage of the First World War, which people tend to forget was one of the worst massacres in human history.

During the Peninsula War, I heard a Portuguese general address his troops before a battle with the words, "Remember men, you are Portuguese!"

So as you go into battle, remember your ancestors and remember your descendants.

I have become an environmentalist, because it is over the environment that the last of the Indian Wars will be fought.

A love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril.

I come from a stupid family. During the civil war my great uncle fought for the west.

The Indian wars have never ended in the Americas.

We view our atomic arsenal as proudly and as devotedly as any pioneer ever viewed his flintlock hanging over the mantel as his children slept, and dreamed.

It runs in the family. And don't expect me to be ashamed. Yankees lock away loony relatives, but down here, we prop 'em up on parade floats and march 'em through the middle of town.

I know that nobody who has grown up in a Jewish environment can ever be not-a-Jew, whether the Jewishness he experienced was defined by his family's sense of history, by its religious observances, or, indeed, by the environment's attitudes toward Jews.

After all, you didn't stay what your people were. No, it was what you were yourself that counted - why, that was the very foundation of America, thought Brook.

Her long life spanned American history from the colonial era to the eve of the Civil War, and she died as the last remaining widow of a Founding Father.

No," I said. "He's a Rabinowitz. He's a semi-decent

She was English, with all the characteristics that word implies.

Family traditions counter alienation and confusion. They help us define who we are they provide something steady, reliable and safe in a confusing world.

Does the soul have a passport? Or do you simply pick the branch of the family tree that you prefer, with its preferred location, and hang your history on it?

Public memory: what every half-educated member of a culture knows in her sinews, for it seeped into them in ways she can hardly remember.

African American history in all its torment and glory is American history, and we cannot move forward until all Americans see it that way.

Monuments are not about history; they are values made visible.

Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory. It's like taking away the ability to remember your dreams. Destroying a culture's books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.

In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned.

World War II destroyed more books and libraries than any event in human history. The Nazis alone destroyed an estimated hundred million books during their twelve years in power.