Quotes About Posterity

As parents, we can have no joy, knowing that this government is not sufficiently lasting to ensure any thing which we may bequeath to posterity: And by a plain method of argument, as we are running the next generation into debt

The least fracture now will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak; the wound will enlarge with the tree, and posterity read it in full grown characters.

It was for us and it will be for others

Libraries and museums owe their richest collections to people who cannot bear to think that their names might perish from the memory of the race.

We do not inherit this land from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.

Life after death means for us that part of our life that lives on in our children, in the influence that survives us after death, and the memories people have of us.

The Constitution of the United States was made not merely for the generation that then existed, but for posterity- unlimited, undefined, endless, perpetual posterity.

After all, it is style alone by which posterity will judge of a great work, for an author can have nothing truly his own but his style.

His objective was to achieve something which the dead, the living, and the children yet unborn would approve of

Whatever happens to me, I will have lived a thousand normal lives by what I might add to others not yet born. That's enough.

One of history's secrets is that the revolutionaries' appeal in the eyes of posterity owes much to the traits they share with the world they overthrew.

A man's desire for a son is usually nothing but the wish to duplicate himself in order that such a remarkable pattern may not be lost to the world.

The Constitution of the United States was made not merely for the generation that then existed, but for posterity—unlimited, undefined, endless, perpetual posterity.

Tradition matters because it is not given to societies to proceed through history as if they had no past and as if every course of action were available to them. they may deviate from the previous trajectory only within a finite margin. the great statesmen act at the outer limit of that margin. if they fall short, society stagnates. if they exceed it, they lose the capacity to shape posterity.

The fact is, I find it extremely difficult to force myself to read old letters... Whenever one really knows the facts, one finds that what is accepted by contemporaries or posterity as the truth about them is so distorted or out of focus that it is not worth worrying about.

There is, I feel, an age at which an individual man would want to stop. You will seek the age at which you would want your species to have stopped. Dissatisfied with your present state for reasons that portend even greater grounds for dissatisfaction for your unhappy posterity, perhaps you would like to be able to go backwards in time.

There is, I feel, an age at which the individual man would want to stop: you will seek the age at which you would desire your Species had stopped. Discontented with your present state for reasons that foretell even greater discontents for your unhappy Posterity, perhaps you would want to be able to go backward in time. This sentiment must be the Eulogy of your first ancestors, the criticism of your contemporaries, and the dread of those who will have the unhappiness to live after you.

Typically your work will end up in a museum [after] you're dead. And maybe that's the function of a museum. It's an archive of your work after you're dead.

Our task is not to leave a record of what happened on this date for those who will inherit the Earth; history will take care of that.

David Foster Wallace understood the paradox of attempting to write fiction that spoke to posterity and a contemporary audience simultaneously

What is thy body but a swallowing grave, Seeming to bury that posterity Which, by the rights of time, thou needs must have If thou destroy them not in dark obscurity? If so, the world will hold thee in disdain, Sith in thy pride so fair a hope is slain.

Happiness is not fame or riches or heroic virtues, but a state that will inspire posterity to think in reflecting upon our life, that it was the life they would wish to live.

Posterity is as likely to be wrong as anybody else.

Few can be induced to labor exclusively for posterity; and none will do it enthusiastically. Posterity has done nothing for us; and theorize on it as we may, practically we shall do very little for it, unless we are made to think we are at the same time doing something for ourselves.