Quotes About Heritage

You have to be taught to recognize and care about differences, you have to be instructed who you really are; you have to learn how generations of dead people and their incomprehensible accomplishments made you the way you are; you have to define your loyalty to an abstraction-based herd that transcends your individuality.

Only the past matters, because it is the only thing that outlives everything and everyone.

In front of the reviewing stand, she presented Joseph with a twenty-six-star, handcrafted silk American flag, sewn for the occasion by the ladies of Nauvoo. Then the officers, the honored guests, and the twenty members of the Legion marching band assembled for the procession to the temple site. Joseph had assigned special places on the reviewing stand to the Sauk Indian chief Keokuk and his entourage, who had crossed over from Iowa to partake in the festivities.

the reason he had known about Islam long before he studied the religion at Dartmouth. He was one-quarter Muslim by birth. Noor had

We are all immigrants, a glorious confection of races and beliefs, united by the rock that we live on. As the years wash over us and new generations march into the future, family histories are subsumed into the greater narrative. We become, simply, Americans.

My fondest hope is that 'Roots' may start black, white, brown, red, yellow people digging back for their own roots. Man, that would make me feel 90 feet tall.

When you start about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth.

In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage- to know who we are and where we have come from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.

In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.

nightly boiling and then cooling a broth of freshly pounded fudano leaves in which she soaked her feat -and the pale palms of her hands- to an inky blackness. When Kunta asked his mother she told him to run along. So he asked his father, who told him, "The more blackness a woman has the more beautiful she is.

Carrying little Kunta in his strong arms, he walked to the edge of the village, lifted his baby up with his face to the heavens, and said softly, "Fend kiling dorong leh warrata ka iteh tee." (Behold—the only thing greater than yourself.)

Tying the little folks with the older folks is a great and powerful tool to preserve and to protect the family and the individual.

Had he himself ever felt Korean inside, for example? How would he know? Wouldn't it just feel like . . . himself? Whatever he'd felt, it was probably not what Scott felt. But also, he was Korean American, not Korean, a distinction he had never been able to explain sufficiently to the white people in his life so far,

One Said, 'My grandfather once planted a Langra tree but, before he could eat the fruit, he had to marry it to another tree. A tamarind. Custom decreed it.' 'I know about that custom,' said a colleague. 'The jasmine is considered a suitable bride for a mango.

Am I then more of an American than those who drew their first breath on American Ground?

It's not enough to be Hungarian, you must have talent too.

every man has a map in his heart of his own country and that the heart will never allow you to forget this map. (p. 18)

And joined in love together,The Thistle, Shamrock, Rose entwineThe Maple Leaf forever!

Trees are your best antiques.

Germans of Jewish descent accounted for an outsize portion of the culture for which the nation would earn renown.

Yes, I am more Russian than many others, and I will not sit still

Well-bred' ensured buckled noses, high-arched feet, a predisposition to madness, and ... an innate belief in our own unquestioning superiority.

In our neighbourhood you believed the same things as everybody else, you wore the same clothes as everybody else and you planned to go into the same job as your father.

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.