Social Legacy Quotes

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations.

This nation’s racial history still casts its long shadow upon us.

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born.

The power of the past does not depend on our knowledge of it.

Are we really so far from the Victorians? Much of what our society holds important was shaped in the 19th century.

I love museums, and I think they're fantastic, but they don't touch the people who I frequently think need to be touched with at least some reminder of legacy.

if we were forced to choose just one, there would be no way to deny that Judaism is the most important intellectual development in human history.

We need the historian and philosopher to give us with trenchant pen, the story of our forefathers, and let our soul and body, with phosphorescent light, brighten the chasm that separates us. We should cling to them just as blood is thicker than water.

I recognize the unknowing, involuntary effect that 'Facts of Life' had and continues to have on several generations of people.

It's not the loss of life that makes the death bitter -- it's the obituaries.

One generation's reform becomes the next generation's problem.

There is no future for a people who deny their past.

The transmission of values from one generation to the next is the single most important task of the society. ...What am I doing to shape the values of the society?

The desire of posthumous fame and the dread of posthumous reproach and execration are feelings from the influence of which scarcely any man is perfectly free, and which in many men are powerful and constant motives of action.

The Boomers have modeled a set of bad habits, and one grand gesture is not going to unwind all those bad habits.

The new generation has to hear what the older generation refuses to tell it.

[The poet] must write as the interpreter of nature and the legislator of mankind, and consider himself as presiding over the thoughts and manners of future generations, as a being superior to time and place.

Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconsciousness with habits and values.

So what are we given? We're also given, my generation, the disillusionment of our parents.

A reason that the past is so hated by the young is that there is no way to be entirely free of it.

… history is that which transforms documents into monuments

… history does not belong to us but rather we to it

Every act of the man inscribes itself in the memories of his fellows, and in his own manners and face. The air is full of sounds;the sky, of tokens; the ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object covered over with hints, which speak to the intelligent.