Antoine de Saint-Exupery Quotes

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.

I think the history and the past we have is just an energy we've built up to do what we do now.

We've got to know our history. We have to be able to bring our children to a place that they can be proud of.

All great peoples are conservative.

Tradition can, to be sure, participate in a creation, but it can no longer be creative itself.

I have nothing against respecting people who lived before, but we have no responsibility toward them.

I'm interested in themes that endure from generation to generation.

We are a continuum. Just as we reach back to our ancestors for our fundamental values, so we, as guardians of that legacy, must reach ahead to our children and their children. And we do so with a sense of sacredness in that reaching.

I'm the proof - you can't throw away tradition.

The Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past.

Societies perish when people forget where they come from.

A lot of people may not read the history of their own country, but they carry on memories transmitted by previous generations. They're trying to achieve something, [they] have their mission and anger -- all this is fed by past experience of history.

History is a novel whose author is the people.

History is a heavy thing everywhere.

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

There's a reason why the cultures of so many Chinatowns around the world in some ways are more Chinese. They've held onto older Chinese rituals, traditions, and symbols in ways that, if you go back to China today, they're not holding on to. They're getting married in white dresses and in churches.

I'm a storyteller. I do this for the next generations. They have to know what traditional alpinism is all about.

Each one of us is a custodian of India's well-being and of the legacy that we will pass on to coming generations.

Every generation enjoys the use of a vast hoard bequeathed to it by antiquity, and transmits that hoard, augmented by fresh acquisitions, to future ages.

No generation can escape history.

I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.

Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past

The wisdom of our parents, grandparents, ancestors. In each individual life, it seems, we must first reject that wisdom, then later come to appreciate it.