Quotes About Heritage

No mater how far you go, never forget where you came from and who showed you the path to reach where you stand today.

The natural world is a world of war; the natural man is a warrior; the natural law is tooth and claw. All else is error. A condition of combat everywhere exists. We are born into perpetual conflict. It is our inheritance, even as it was the heritage of previous generations.

My dad wanted to name me after Rainier Maria Rilke, the poet.

The great sages of my Indian heritage had cultivated equanimity and detachment in the face of life's challenges, and I strove to emulate them by accepting what had happened to me with as much grace as I could muster.

They belong to one another because, to use Gandhi's language, they drink the same water, breathe the same air and eat the same soil's produce. And because they share the same history, even while often looking at it from clashing angles.

Nishan Sahib), which was raised at every gurdwara from the 1620s, when Guru Hargobind led the community.

Many of today's youngsters are unaware that in their grandparents' time Kolkata, Dhaka and Chittagong were part of a single entity, and Lahore, Rawalpindi, Amritsar and Jalandhar likewise. And they are unaware of what it means for a nation to find freedom.

Bedis, Sodhis, Trehans and Bhallas coming down from Guru Nanak, Guru Ram Das, Guru Angad and Guru Amar Das

While one can do nothing about choosing one's relatives one can, as artist, choose one's "ancestors."

Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.

There's a lot of heredity in that family.

The first farmer was the first man, and all historic nobility rests on possession and use of land.

The first farmer was the first man. All historic nobility rests on the possession and use of land.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

Language is the archives of history…. Language is fossil poetry.

Many of the historical proverbs have a doubtful paternity.

If you happen to be born into an Indian family, an Indian family from the Caribbean, migratory, never certain of the terrain, that's how life falls down around you. It's close and thick and sheltering, its ugly and violent secrets locked inside the family walls. The outside encroaches, but the ramparts are strong, and once you leave it you have no shelter and no ready skills for finding a different one. I found that out after years of trying.

Srinagar, there was a grave of a Christian soldier from Travancore, which had the Vedic swastika and a verse from the Quran inscribed on it. There could be 'no more poignant and touching symbolof the essential oneness and unity of India'.61

India incorporates a greater variety of religions (whether born in its soil or imported) than any other nation in human history.

People who don't cherish their elderly have forgotten whence they came and whither they go.

Ancestor worship is not alone the exotic preoccupation of quaint people mired in superstition in some remote corner of the world. Larger-than-life evidence of its industrialized-world variants can be seen in virtually every public park in America.

In the animated Dreamworks movie Prince of Egypt the ancient Egyptians are drawn to appear more Arab than African. But the ancient Egyptians came originally from Africa's interior to the south. They were not Arabs, not people from Arabia, but indigenous Africans. Egyptian civilization was thousands of years old by the time the Arabs, with a modest army under General 'Amr ibn as- 'As, entered in December of 639 A.D.

State and federal budgets, to which Asians, Hispanics, and African Americans contribute, are uniformly controlled by whites who seem to uniformly believe that the only ancestor worship worth funding is theirs.

Though it would appear that Americans grow less knowledgeable by the day, there are still many American schoolchildren who recognize the Roman Colosseum, the Great Wall of China, the Parthenon, the Tower of London. From Africa, only the great pyramids of Egypt enjoy such broad recognition, and they are popularly and wrongly attributed to a civilization not spawned from Africa's interior.