Quotes About Heritage

When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for; and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, 'See! This our fathers did for us.

It does not much matter that an individual loses two or three hundred pounds in buying a bad picture, but it is to be regretted that a nation should lose two or three hundred thousand in raising a ridiculous building.

most old farmhouses were built like that.

Lot of Irish in Mexico. The Mexican name, Obregon? It comes from O'Brien.

blackballed from guild roles for two generations, because apparently mutiny is in the DNA, like eye color or a tendency toward irritable bowels. On

When you study history, you're really studying yourself. Every bit of history I've uncovered about my own family has some remnant in myself.

Like most passionate nations, Texas has its own history based on, but not limited by, facts.

First the strangers came with argument and authority and gunpowder to back up both. And in the four hundred years Kino's people had learned only one defense - a slight slitting of the eyes and a slight tightening of the lips and a retirement. Nothing could break down this wall, and they could remain whole within the wall.

but it's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours- being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.

That's what makes it ours-being born on it, working on it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.

After the bare requisites to living and reproducing, man wants most to leave some record of himself, a proof, perhaps, that he has really existed. He leaves his proof on wood, on stone or on the lives of other people.

I don't very much believe in blood," said Samuel. "I think when a man finds good or bad in his children he is seeing only what he planted in them after they cleared the womb." "You can't make a race horse of a pig." "No," said Samuel, "but you can make a very fast pig.

I printed it once more on my eyes, south, west, and north, and then we hurried away from the permanent and changeless past where my mother is always shooting a wildcat and my father is always burning his name with his love.

It's too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry.

Don't you dare take the lazy way. It's too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry...Whatever you do, it will be you who do it-not your mother.

Her great-great-great-great-great grandmother had been burned as a witch.

No, in Ireland." "And in a few years you can almost disappear; while I, who was born in Grass Valley, went to school and several years to the University of California, have no chance of mixing.

And this is about the way the Salinas Valley was when my grandfather brought his wife and settled in the foothills to the east of King City.

The names of places carry a charge of the people who named them.

We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours--being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.

And of course they were descended from the ancient kings of Ireland, as every Irishman is.

Grampa an' the old place, they was jus' the same thing.

Don't you dare take the lazy way. It's too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry.

Americans are much more American than they are Northerners, Southerners, Westerners, or Easterners. And descendants of English, Irish, Italian, Jewish, German, Polish are essentially American