Quotes About Heritage

We received our coloring from Norsemen. Hairy savages who hacked their gods to pieces and hung the flesh from trees. We are the ones who sacked Rome. Fear only feeble old age and death in bed. Don't forget who you are.

Jews have had to carry around their own sense of self in a carpet bag and I think perhaps too much emphasis might be being put on nationality and on the other hand patriotism, that sort of thing.

Great persons, like great empires, leave their mark on history.

1 Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral May you have no frost on your spuds, No worms on your cabbage. May your goat give plenty of milk. If you inherit a donkey, may she be in foal. Irish saying There's no denying the fact that my grandpa Aengus shaped the way I look at life. The man had a saying for everything. If I fell and scraped my knee, he mended it with an Irish proverb: "For every storm, a rainbow, for every tear, a smile." If I woke up with a head cold, he had an Irish

Turning back to embrace the past has been a long, slow lesson not only in self-esteem, but in patriotism—pride in homeland, heritage. It has taken a decade to whip the shame, to mispronounce words and shun grammar when mispronunciation and misspeaking are part of my dialect, to own the bad blood. What I come from has made me who I am.

Although I was reared on a junkyard by parents who did not waste time hiking or camping, I knew pine trees and pitcher plants, bobcats and brown thrashers, as my people.

Tigers die and leave their skins; people die and leave their names.

Harry Truman had no middle name, just an initial "S," which was a reference to his two grandfathers, Solomon Young and Anderson Shipp Truman.

This book is about racial identity, something most people who are not white take for granted. They come to it early, feel it strongly, and make no apologies for it.

It is only a matter of time before this gives rise to an increasingly explicit white racial consciousness.

This is a historically black community," said Lynn Hendy, president of the property owners association. "I'd like it to stay that way."127

Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.

Macon has such a rich musical history - and the state of Georgia, as well.

What you do is your legacy.

They were always Albanians. You know what that means. Some Catholics, some Orthodox. And some, in time, were Muslims, too. But the first religion of the Albanian, as they say, is Albania.

Ata ishin gjithmonë shqiptarë. Ti e di se çfarë do të thotë. Disa katolikë, disa ortodoksë. Dhe disa, në kohë, ishin myslimanë. Por feja e parë e shqiptarëve, siç thonë ata, është Shqipëria

Once you're several generations removed from your cultural heritage, how much connection is truly possible? Bits and pieces might be integrated into home life—a cultural event here, some ethnic food there—but for the most part the upbringing is American.

Some are born Welsh. Some achieve Welshness. I am going to thrust myself upon Wales.

Having words and explanations for things is too modern

The genome of every human cell has memory. You know what that means? As evolved beings we have in our genes memories of the far past, of long-ago generations, memories of experiences not our own.

Georgie's grandfather had been born in Italy, and lived in America for five years before he got his citizenship papers, at which time he could rightfully be called an Italian-American. In Georgie's eyes, this was the only time the hyphenate could be used properly. His parents had been born here of Italian-American parents, but this did not make them similarly Italian-Americans, it made them simply Americans

Gloria Anzaldúa, who revolutionised the Chicana writing of her generation, called the border 'una herida abierta – an open wound – where the Third World grates against the First and bleeds. And before a scab forms, it haemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two countries merging to form a third country – a border culture.

All he knew was that he could not eat the flesh of this black man, and thus hereditary instinct, ages old, usurped the functions of his untaught mind and saved him from transgressing a worldwide law of whose very existence he was ignorant.

p 18 - Hundreds of thousands of years ago our ancestors of the dim and distant past faced the same problems which we must face in the same primeval forest. That we are here today evidences their victory.