Quotes about heritage

The myth is not my own I have it from my mother. Euripides

We do not have to be ashamed of what we are. As sentient beings we have wonderful backgrounds. These backgrounds may not be particularly enlightened or peaceful or intelligent. Nevertheless, we have soil good enough to cultivate; we can plant anything in it.

A traditionalist’s values are gleaned from all that is good in the past.

Those with traditional sense will follow what their heart tells them is right.

The main vehicle for nineteenth-century socialization was the leading textbook used in elementary school. They were so widely used that sections in them became part of the national language. Theodore Roosevelt, scion of an elite New York family, schooled by private tutors, had been raised on the same textbooks as the children of Ohio farmers, Chicago tradesman, and New England fishermen. If you want to know what constituted being a good American from the mid-nineteenth century to World War I, sp

Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.

Words contain the "souls" or minds of people in the past; as such, they tell the story of consciousness.

Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.

Finally, we entered Chetaube County, my imaginary birthplace, where the names of the little winding roads and minuscule mountain communities never failed to inspire me: Yardscrabble, Big Log, Upper, Middle and Lower Pigsty, Chicken Scratch, Cooterville, Felchville, Dust Rag, Dough Bag, Uranus Ridge, Big Bottom, Hooter Holler, Quickskillet, Buck Wallow, Possum Strut ... We always say a picture speaks a thousand words, but isn’t the opposite equally true?

No matter what a person does to cover up and conceal themselves, when we write and lose control, I can spot a person from Alabama, Florida, South Carolina a mile away even if they make no exact reference to location. Their words are lush like the land they come from, filled with nine aunties, people named Bubba. There is something extravagant and wild about what they have to say — snakes on the roof of a car, swamps, a delta, sweat, the smell of sea, buzz of an air conditioner, Coca-Cola — somet

I like uncovering the cultural prejudices I didn't even know.

A reformer exhorted children that they would succeed where he and his colleagues had failed with the charge: "Live for that better day.

Knowledge is not a heritage to be passed on so much as it is something to be created and continually increased

Many races as well as cultural influences of men of all kinds have mixed into any man. To select, for approbation the peculiar elements that come from some supposedly Jewish heredity is to open the door to all kinds of nonsense on racial theory.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind.

Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid.

You are one woman in an endless line of women who were chosen to love more passionately than others, be committed to justice more fervently than others, and seek our Maker’s higher expressions more reflectively than others.

And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds "joy luck" is not a word, it does not exist. They see daughters wh

My tongue was handed down to meby datus and katipuneros. The truth ismy mouth is a battlefield thatyou wouldn’t know how to fight in.

Bloodlines and last names didn't make a man extraordinary — the extraordinary existed in what we did in life, not in who we were.

Your ancestors are rooting for you.

Part of me shall dwell in my daughter to call upon in times of need of course.

Genealogy itself is something of a privilege, coming far more easily to those of us for whom enslavement, conquest, and dispossession of our land has not been our lot.

Heritage was everything: it was a golden skeleton key, gleaming with power, able to get the wielder through any number of locked doors; it was the christening of the marriage bed with virgin blood on snow-white sheets; it was the benediction of a pristine pedigree, refined through ages of selective breeding and the occasional mercy culling.It was life, and death, and all that spanned between.It was his birthright.

Think of all the love poured into him. Think of the tuitions for Montessori and music lessons. Think of the gasoline expended, the treads worn carting him to football games, basketball tournaments, and Little League. Think of the time spent regulating sleepovers. Think of the surprise birthday parties, the daycare, and the reference checks on babysitters. Think of World Book and Childcraft. Think of checks written for family photos. Think of credit cards charged for vacations. Think of soccer ba

But let us not forget that human love and compassion are equally deeply rooted in our primate heritage, and in this sphere too our sensibilities are of a higher order of magnitude than those of chimpanzees.

Blood memory is described as our ancestral (genetic) connection to our language, songs, spirituality, and teachings. It is the good feeling that we experience when we are near these things.

Stories were heirlooms in these parts.

Our children are an integral component of our stories as we are of theirs and, therefore, each child acts as the knighted messengers to carry their forebears’ stories into the future. To deprive our children of the narrative cells regarding the formation of the ozone layer that rims the atmosphere of our ancestors’ saga and parental determination of selfhood is to deny them of the sacred right to claim the sanctity of their heritage. Accordingly, all wrinkled brow natives are chargeable with the

Giving Back reframes portraits of philanthropy.

People say you're born innocent, but it's not true. You inherit all kinds of things that you can do nothing about. You inherit your identity, your history, like a birthmark that you can't wash off. ... We are born with our heads turned back, but my mother says we have to face into the future now. You have to earn your own innocence, she says. You have to grow up and become innocent.

Let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.

Before the man lost his sight, he read this story in a magazine: a group of explorers came upon a community of parrots speaking the language of a society that had been wiped out in a recent catastrophe. Astonished by their discovery, they put the parrots in cages and sent them home so that linguists could record what remained of the lost language. But the parrots, already traumatized by the devastation they had recently witnessed, died on the way.The man feels a great fraternity with those birds

Your past's a private matter, sweetheart. You just keep it locked up in xbox where it can't hurt anyone.

Bless all the women of this world who nurture our heritage while too many man rush off to kill for ideals that might now be deeply and personally held, but will often be viewed as repugnant by later generations.

It was truer to my father to let the songs he'd sung die with him, little by little, averse at a time. How could these art-mongers constantly ignore the mortality of beauty, a pleonasm if ever I'd heard one?

Originality must compound with inheritance.

The inventor knows HOW to borrow.

If soldiering did not interest him, the soldiers themselves were another matter. He loved to sit with the men and draw out their first-hand stories of past campaigns.

My son will wear the title well, the Duke thought, and realized with a sudden chill that this was another death thought.

Gen. de Gaulle is only concerned about history, and no jury can dictate the judgment of history." Georges Pompidou

If you live long enough, you see the same eyes in different people

Thus she returned to the theme of ‘before,’ but in a different way than she had at first. She said that we didn’t know anything, either as children or now, that we were therefore not in a position to understand anything, that everything in the neighborhood, every stone or piece of wood, everything, anything you could name, was already there before us, but we had grown up without realizing it, without ever even thinking about it. Not just us. Her father pretended that there had been nothing befor

The study of the past is the main portal through which culture is acquired.

A written constitution is needed to protect values AGAINST prevailing wisdom.

Nature is increasingly the thematic focus of industrial heritage.

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.

If the rowan's roots are shallow, it bears no crown.

A true love can cross through your legacy and heritage.

The media "could not be policed from without and had to be policed from within.

There is nothing I like better than conversing with aged men. For I regard them as travelers who have gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to inquire whether the way is smooth and easy or rugged and difficult. Is life harder toward the end, or what report do you give it?

I hold that a strongly marked personality can influence descendants for generations.

Lawrence will go on burying his own undertakers.

I wished that I had some other guardian of minor abilities.

While Johns (Martin Luther King's predecessor as pastor in Montgomery) agreed with Dexter's general disdain for emotionalism, he was very fond of traditional spirituals, believing they represented a part of their history they ought to embrace and celebrate.

We live among ruins in a World in which ‘god is dead’ as Nietzsche stated. The ideals of today are comfort, expediency, surface knowledge, disregard for one’s ancestral heritage and traditions, catering to the lowest standards of taste and intelligence, apotheosis of the pathetic, hoarding of material objects and possessions, disrespect for all that is inherently higher and better — in other wordsa complete inversion of true values and ideals, the raising of the victory flag of ignorance and the

The real social contract, (Edmund Burke) argued, was not Rousseau's social contract between the noble savage and the General Will, but a "partnership" between the present generation and future generations.

A father's aim is to raise children who themselves raise good citizens.

A concerted effort to preserve our heritage is a vital link to our cultural, educational, aesthetic, inspirational, and economic legacies - all of the things that quite literally make us who we are.

Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. Something cannot emerge from nothing.

If you bungle raising children, I don't think whatever else you do matters very much.

i lost a whole continent.a whole continent from my memory.unlike all other hyphenated americans my hyphen is made of blood.when africa says hellomy mouth is a heartbreakbecause i have nothing in my tongueto answer her.i don’t know how to say hello to my mother.

When we reject our origins, we become the product of whatever soil that we find ourselves planted; the colors of our leaves change as we consume borrowed nutrients with borrowed roots and, like a tree, we grow.

It seems like the best escape games come from Japan for some reason. It makes me proud.

However much they may smile at her, the old inhabitants would miss Tillie. Her stories give them something to talk about and to conjecture about, cut off as they are from the restless currents of the world. The many naked little sandbars which lie between Venice and the mainland, in the seemingly stagnant water of the lagoons, are made habitable and wholesome only because, every night, a foot and a half of tide creeps in from the sea and winds its fresh brine up through all that network of shini

How to teach again what has been taught correctly it incorrectly 1000 thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task. How to render back into light-world language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark? Many failures attest to the difficulties of this life-affirmative threshold.

I inherited curiosity from my Dad.

The author says that one of the difficulties of modern parenting is the uncertainty of what parents are preparing children for. In traditional societies this was clear, as parents prepared children for a society and for roles much like their own. She writes, "There is no folk wisdom.

They don't know the distinction between taking care of a child and raising a child.

It is myopic to base sweeping change on the narrow experience of a few years.

Don't you sense the enormity of your mistake – you invade a country without understanding its music. – Norman Mailer

John Brown, raised by disciplinarians, became one himself.

Liberals tend to view traditions, policies, and morals of past generations as arbitrary designs put in place by less enlightened people. Because of this, liberals don't pay much attention to why traditions developed or wonder about possible ramifications of their social engineering.

Pride is instilled. It's what we carry with us every day of our lives.

Building a naval power takes generations, not so much to develop the necessary technology as to pass along the accumulated experience that creates good admirals.

As it stands there is a very strong argument that as the book trade becomes increasingly corporate it's our literary heritage that is at risk - a vital part of our culture.

We can't surrender to the culture. We've minimized the role of fathers, so we've created a generation of barbarians, children who become men without growing up. They stay in boyhood through their 20s and 30s, sometimes their whole lives. They think of themselves first, indulge in pornography, do what they feel like, leave their wives, and culture, and churches to raise their children.

My father used to say that stories are part of the most precious heritage of mankind.

Conclusions that philosophers first establish by way of torturous reasoning have a way, over time, of leaking into shared knowledge.

What makes a civilization real to its inhabitants, in the end, is not just the splendid edifices at it centre, nor even the smooth functioning of the institutions they house. At its core, a civilization is the texts that are taught in its schools, learned by its students and recollected in times of tribulation.

A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortality

Nations as well as men require time to learn, whatever may be their intelligence or zeal.

Longing for something fresh, for something no one else has said often leads to bad exegesis.

Violence is temporary, but learning is permanent.

Anecdotes came with his DNA.

It always matters who the storyteller is. It’s a lens.

He had to grow his own NCOs.

In her fury she'd broken into Valencian, indicating the deepest possible roots in the land. I was impressed with how deeply she was from here, in a way I could never imagine being from anywhere, not even my home town.

I had rather that the human race, having a certain quality in their lives, should continue for only a few centuries than that, losing freedom, friendship, dignity, and mercy, and learning to be quite content without them, they should continue for millions of millennia.

The larger question is, as virologist Jonas Salk once asked, "Are we being good ancestors?

countries who have a longer past are better able see further forward into the future and think about extending the time period that they've already been around into the distant future.

There should be an honored place in history for statesmen whose ideas turned out to be right.

It was easier to come to maturity when there were more well-defined philosophical options.

Chronicling future appeasing Prime Minister Joseph Chamberlain's rise to Parliament from first-generation commercial interests rather than the aristocracy, the author diagnoses even then that he had no center outside himself.

He knew all the stories. His grandfather had given them to him when he sat between the old man’s knees as a child. It was a comfort, though, to hear them again. To call them to mind. All these stories that made him more than just a vintner and more than just a man who carried a spear whom other men were willing to follow. More than just a man who lay dying. The stories made him one of the People, who would never die.

I am praying that the issues from the last 12 generations go into the ground with me so I have NEW issue is to pass on to my son.

Old men want to feel that the experience which has come with their years is valuable, that their advice is valuable, that they possess a sagacity that could be obtained only through experience— a sagacity that could be of use to young men if only young men would ask.

During the whole time consumed in the slow growth of this family tree, the house of Smallweed, always early to go out and late to marry, has strengthened itself in its practical character, has discarded all amusements, discountenanced all story-books, fairy-tales, fictions, and fables, and banished all levities whatsoever. Hence the gratifying fact that it has had no child born to it and that the complete little men and women whom it has produced have been observed to bear a likeness to old monk

Good wombs have borne bad sons."-- (Miranda, I:2)