Quotes About Posterity

It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us, but not impossible that it may respect or sympathize so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face.

Greatness comes from beginning something that does not end with you.

How this seemingly dull, phlegmatic man, in a stupendous act of nation building, presided over the victorious Continental Army and forged the office of the presidency is a mystery to most Americans. Something essential about Washington has been lost to posterity, making him seem a worthy but plodding man who somehow stumbled into greatness.

It was certainly not their intention, but the trustbusters helped to preserve Rockefeller's legacy for posterity and unquestionably made him the world's richest man.

Life and Death The living are but passers-by, And those are going home who die. The sky and earth are hotels just For all to grieve over age-old dust. The Moon Goddess lives long in vain; The sacred tree's cut down with pain. The bleached bones can nor speak nor sing. Could green pines feel the warmth of spring? Ancestors and posterity, Don't prize but sigh for vanity.

Only a person with a Best Seller mind can write Best Sellers; and only someone with a mind like Shelley's can write Prometheus Unbound. The deliberate forger has little chance with his contemporaries and none at all with posterity.

It is quite rare for God to provide a great man at the necessary moment to carry out some great deep, which is why when this unusual combination of circumstance does occur, history at once records the name of the chosen one and recommends him to the admiration of posterity.

Capricious and unfaithful, the king wished to be called Louis the Just and Louis the Chaste. Posterity will find a difficulty in understanding this character, which history explains only by facts and never by reason.

The best that we can hope for in this life is that we shall not have sons and grandsons of whom we need to be ashamed.

Leibniz dedicated his life to efforts to educate people to understand that true happiness is found by locating their identity in benefitting mankind and their posterity.

Instead, I've got the Hewitt boys down on paper. So that 100 years from now some reader I don't know can see how dumb they were!

Meanwhile, in our society we face not only persecution of people with diverse expressions of gender and sexuality, but also the prospect of doing permanent harm to the integrity of the gene pool of our species, thereby damaging our species for posterity.

According to Augustine, "Eve borrowed sin from the devil and wrote a bill and provided a surety, and the interest on the debt was heaped upon posterity. . . . She wrote the bill when she reached out her hand to the forbidden apple." And in the end, adds the Golden Legend, "Christ took this bill and nailed it to the cross.

I was about to become the world's best-kept secret; one that would never be told. What a thrilling enigma for posterity I should be!

The kind of ancestors we have had is not as important as the kind of descendants our ancestors have.

After God had carried us safe to New-England, and wee had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, rear'd convenient places for Gods worship, and setled the Civill Government: One of the next things we longed for, and looked after was to advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate Ministery to the Churches, when our present Ministers shall lie in the Dust.

As for the well-known Amory, he would write immortal literature if he were sure enough to risk telling anyone else about it. There is no more dangerous gift to posterity than a few cleverly turned platitudes.

I refuse to dedicate my life to posterity. Surely one owes as much to the current generation as to one's unwanted children. What a fate - to grow rotund and unseemly, to lose my self-love, to think in terms of milk, oatmeal, nurse, diapers. ...Dear dream children, how much more beautiful you are, dazzling little creatures who flutter (all dream children must flutter) on golden, golden wings.

On the contrary. When a man speaks he's merely tradition. He has at best a few thousand years back of him. But woman, why, she is the miraculous mouthpiece of posterity.

Posterity is the world to come; the world for whom we hold our ideals, from whom we have borrowed our planet, and to whom we bear sacred responsibility. We must do what America does best: offer more opportunity to all and demand responsibility from all.

Who could look on these monuments without reflecting on the vanity of mortals in thus offering up testimonials of their respect for persons of whose very names posterity is ignorant?

My thoughts fly to the old Icelandic storytellers who created our classics, whose personalities were so bound up with the masses that their names, unlike their lives' work, have not been preserved for posterity.

Leibniz dedicated his life to efforts to educate people to understand that true happiness is found by locating their identity in benefitting mankind and their posterity.

posterity was a vaudeville joke audible only to those with front-row seats...