Quotes About Posterity

Posterity will jump to conclusions: that is its nature.

What is birth to a man if it shall be a stain to his dead ancestors to have left such an offspring?

I believe the man who will go down in posterity is the man who paints his own time and the scenes of everyday life around him.

When a virtuous man is raised, it brings gladness to his friends, grief to his enemies, and glory to his posterity.

The survivorship of a worthy man in his son is a pleasure scarce inferior to the hopes of the continuance of his own life.

Think of it. To go down to posterity as a 'man who lived among the cannibals.'

I do not suppose I shall be remembered for anything. But I don't think about my work in those terms. It is just as vulgar to work for the sake of posterity as to work for the sake of money.

Your descendants shall gather your fruits.

The poet is he who can write some pure mythology today without the aid of posterity.

Both men lost speech in their last days and hours. Both died at age sixty-three, Lee long since weary of life, and Grant ready to live it again. Their war made them national icons, and their war reputations dictated the balance of their lives, careers, and posterity.

We don't inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.

He wouldn't perform without a recording now, she was certain, like a poet working in the oral tradition who had been contaminated by the advent of the recording device and so insisted that all improvisations be saved for posterity.

Nugent worried instead about his own mortality—about dying on a faraway battlefield without "leaving an heir behind to … represent me hereafter in the affairs of men.

God and posterity will show me more favour

This I regard as history's highest function, to let no worthy action be uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds.

The words that a father speaks to his children in the privacy of home are not heard by the world, but, as in whispering galleries, they are clearly heard at the end, and by posterity.

Posterity alone rightly judges kings. Posterity alone has the right to accord or withhold honors.

Success is not success without a successor.

Time will discover everything to posterity; it is a babbler, and speaks even when no question is put.

His conclusion, preserved for posterity, was that the experiment of interning families of suspected nationalities—German, Japanese, Italians, and others—was a failure. Nonetheless,

A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper, and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

So far is it from being true that we acquired a right by the Revolution to elect our kings that, if we had possessed it before, the English nation did at that time most solemnly renounce and abdicate it, for themselves and for all their posterity forever.

Posterity, who experienced the fatal effects of his maxims and example, justly considered him as the principal author of the decline of the Roman empire.

If our biological imperative is to pass our genes to the next generation, our moral imperative has to be to try, before we become corpses, to leave them a planet they can survive on.