Quotes About Heritage

It is very important to go home if you want your work to be whole. You don't have to move in with your parents and collect an allowance, but you must claim where you come from and look deep into it. Come to honor and embrace it, or at least, accept it.

The old men with their traditions challenged Refrained from tears.

For thousands of years

When Jews abandon identity in the pursuit of universal freedom, they end up with neither.

He is dark as history, origin of the word native: the weight of blood

I came from somewhat of a musical family. I had an uncle on Broadway. My dad kind of knows how to play instruments. Although, I always find it annoying when he does play an instrument.

There were new words for everything in their dead language put back to use. New words for the jets and their radar systems. New words for the tanks and the radios inside. But for this, for the hammer and beat of the forge, the Bible still sufficed.

What I'm trying to say, whether you want to take it seriously or not, is that you can't build Judaism only on the foundation of one terrible crime. It is about this obsession with the Holocaust as a necessary sign of identity. As your only educational tool. Because for the children, there is no connection otherwise. Nothing Jewish that binds.

I looked around almost in surprise, as though I had not been born here, but had suddenly dropped from the skies, or emerged from somewhere deep down in the earth, to find myself in a place where I did not belong, in a home which was not mine, born from a father who was not my father, and from a mother who was not my mother.

Well, if there is a spectrum between ethnic and civic forms of nationalism, which is a rather schematic way of looking at it, all nationalism contains elements of both, but Scotland is very far on the civic end of the spectrum. That is partly because nobody has ever been stupid enough to say that Scotland is an ethnicity in a genetic sense. A kingdom of Scotland existed long before anybody talked of a Scottish people. So that is one thing we have been spared.

Our home villages with the hills, mountains and forests, the lakes and ponds, rivers and streams, waterfall and fjords. The smell of new hay in summer, of birches in spring, of the sea, and the big forest, and even the biting winter cold. Everything . . . Norwegian songs and music and so much, much more. That's our Fatherland and that's what we have to struggle to get back.

The Parthenon without the marbles is like a smile with a tooth missing.

To a degree that would be astonishing in the United States, Vietnamese in all walks of life could recite long passages from poems, recount folktales and legends, and discuss novels thirty years old as if the characters lived next door.

Dedicated to the future, with honor to the past.

Whatever is left behind in the passing of a rare talent, so much is always lost.

It is certain that no culture can flourish without narratives of transcendent origin and power

Why would other Italians have shunned Joey's grandfather? Was it a case of "close the door behind you?" Were they worried that newcomers would damage the foothold they'd established in the US?

Well, for what's good, you have to go somewhere else. But for what Mother used to make, dis is da place...

Evolutionary biologists now reckon that the six to seven billion people now living share the same small number of ancestors living two or three thousand years ago. These circumstances make nonsense of anybody's pretensions to find a pure racial ancestry.

Ancient Greeks did not think in terms of race (later translators would put that word in their mouths); instead, Greeks thought of place.

The alarming history of European marble "cleaning" includes a chapter on this statuary describing a drive to make ancient Greek art white nearly destroyed the art itself. In the 1930s workers in the British Museum were directed to remove the dark patina with metal tools on the mistaken assumption that their proper color should be white. Such a "cleaning" seriously damaged the Parthenon marbles, prompting an inquiry by the museum's standing committee that halted the work.

I'm homesick, not for America, but for Negroes.

I believed that I would become a counsellor to the Thembu king,

Africa's rock art is the common heritage of all Africans, but it is more than that. It is the common heritage of humanity.