Posterity Quotes

The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale

Land is not something you inherit from your parents. It is something you borrow from your children.

I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy.

Americans look foward to their posterity rather than backward to their ancestors.

Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom.

Great men, unknown to their generation, have their fame among the great who have preceded them, and all true worldly fame subsides from their high estimate beyond the stars.

Posterity will talk of Washington as the founder of a great empire, when my name shall be lost in the vortex of revolution.

The earth belongs in usufruct to the living.

To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.

If to be venerated for benevolence, if to be admired for talents, if to be esteemed for patriotism, if to be beloved for philanthropy, can gratify the human mind, you must have the pleasing consolation to know that you have not lived in vain.

Abolition—Yes! abolish everything on the face of the earth but this Union; free every slave—slay every traitor—burn every rebel mansion, if these things be necessary to preserve this temple of freedom to the world and to our posterity.

A man has only one way of being immortal on earth: he has to forget he is a mortal.

Go on, get out - last words are for fools who haven't said enough. To his housekeeper, who urged him to tell her his last words so she could write them down for posterity.

Think of your forefathers! Think of your posterity!

The thing with all the Founding Fathers, one of the most common words they used was 'posterity.' They were constantly referring to posterity.

The difference between a politician and a statesman is: a politician thinks of the next election and a statesman thinks of the next generation.

We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.

Architecture is a political art connecting our values to the ages.

I suppose that every one of us hopes secretly for immortality; to leave, I mean, a name behind him which will live forever in this world, whatever he may be doing, himself, in the next.

I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

History is written not only for posterity but by posterity as well.

What's really important for me is, as an old man, I'm known by my own generation and the next generation know me, too.

No man is truly great who is great only in his lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history.

Let us contemplate our forefathers, and posterity, and resolve to maintain the rights bequeathed to us from the former, for the sake of the latter.

Poets have said that the reason to have children is to give yourself immortality. Immortality? Now that I have five children, my only hope is that they are all out of the house before I die.