Posterity Quotes - Page 8

• There is no fullness of joy in the next life without a family unit, including a husband, a wife, and posterity. Further, men are that they might have joy. In the eternal perspective, same-gender activity will only bring sorrow and grief and the loss of eternal opportunities.

  Dallin H. Oaks

  Husband, Grief, Loss

  Source: www.mormonnewsroom.org

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• To avoid the consequences of posterity the mulattos give the blacks a first class letting alone. There is a frantic stampede white-ward to escape from Jamaica's black mass.

  Zora Neale Hurston

  Jamaica, Class, White

  Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker (1979). “I Love Myself when I Am Laughing ... and Then Again when I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader”, p.125, Feminist Press at CUNY

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• We shall all consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts, and morally bound to pay them ourselves; and consequently within what may be deemed the period of a generation, or the life of the majority.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Wisdom, Majority, Generations

  Thomas Jefferson (2010). “The Works of Thomas Jefferson: Correspondence and Papers, 1808-1816”, p.309, Cosimo, Inc.

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• The whole of education should be designed so as to occupy a boy's free time in cultivation of his body.  He has no right to loaf about idly; but after his day's work is done, he ought to harden his young body, so that life may not find him soft when he enters it.  No one should be allowed to sin at the expense of posterity, that is, of the race.

  Adolf Hitler

  Boys, Race, Done

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• 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.

  Alexandre Dumas

  Men, Names, Doe

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• I'm not going to write for posterity. I'm going to write to make a buck.

  Elmore Leonard

  Writing, Bucks

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• We cannot defer this responsibility to posterity. Time will not wait.

  Walter Cronkite

  Responsibility, Waiting

  Address on receiving the Norman Cousins Global Governance Award at the UN Delegates Dining Room, October 19, 1999.

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• There are many points in the history of an invention which the inventor himself is apt to overlook as trifling, but in which posterity never fail to take a deep interest. The progress of the human mind is never traced with such a lively interest as through the steps by which it perfects a great invention; and there is certainly no invention respecting which this minute information will be more eagerly sought after, than in the case of the steam-engine.

  David Brewster

  Creativity, Science, Mind

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• If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a happier or a better population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it.

  John Stuart Mill

  Long, Support, Earth

  John Stuart Mill (1848). “Principles of political economy with some of their applications to social philosophy”, p.317

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• We National Socialists must hold unflinchingly to our aim in foreign policy, namely to secure for the German people the land and soil to which they are entitles on this earth. And this action is the only one which, before God and or German posterity, would make any sacrifice of blood seem justified: before God, since we have been put on this earth with the mission of eternal struggle for our daily bread.

  Adolf Hitler

  Struggle, Sacrifice, Land

  Adolf Hitler (1943). “Mein Kampf”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Honor, justice, and humanity, call upon us to hold, and to transmit to our posterity, that liberty which we received from our ancestors. It is not our duty to leave wealth to our children, but it is our duty to leave liberty to them.

  John Dickinson

  Children, Justice, Humanity

  "A Library of American Literature From the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time". Book by Edmund Clarence Stedman, Volume 3, 'A Duty to Posterity' (pp. 177-178), 1892.

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• We are a kind of posterity in respect to them.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Kindness, Kind

  Benjamin Franklin (1900). “The life of Benjamin Franklin”

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• It so happens that the work which is likely to be our most durable monument, and to convey some knowledge of us to the most remote posterity, is a work of bare utility; not a shrine, not a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge.

  Montgomery Schuyler

  Engineering, Bridges, Shrines

  Montgomery Schuyler (1892). “American Architecture”

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• Here lies the sense of literary creation to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in kindly mirrors of future times. . . . To find in objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern . . .

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Lying, Mirrors, Ordinary

  Vladimir Nabokov (2011). “The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov”, p.157, Vintage

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• The survivorship of a worthy man in his son is a pleasure scarce inferior to the hopes of the continuance of his own life.

  Richard Steele

  Son, Men, Pleasure

  Joseph Addison, Richard Steele (1854). “The Spectator”, p.125

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• A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural.

  Adam Smith

  Earth, Generations, Absurd

  Adam Smith (1964). “Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms”

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• We have castrated society through fear and intimidation. Its manhood exists only in combination with a feminine outward appearance. Being so neutered, the populace has become docile and easily ruled. As all geldings in nature, their thoughts are not involved with the concerns of the future and their posterity, but only with the present toil and the next meal.

  Harold Wallace Rosenthal

  Next, Toil, Meals

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• Psychoanalytic theory is the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century and a terminal product as well-something akin to a dinosaur or zeppelin in the history of ideas, a vast structure of radically unsound design and with no posterity.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Ideas, History

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• I suggest that what we want to do is not to leave to posterity a great institution, but to leave behind a great tradition of journalism ably practiced in our time.

  Henry R. Luce

  Want, Journalism, Tradition

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• Whatever the skill of any country may be in the sciences, it is from its excellence in polite learning alone that it must expect a character from posterity.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Country, Learning, Character

  Oliver Goldsmith (1834). “An inquiry into the present state of polite learning. The Bee. History of Cyrillo Padovano. Life of Dr. Parnell. Life of Lord Bolingbroke. Prefaces and introductions”, p.11

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• I have begun to feel that there is a tendency in 20th Century science to forget that there will be a 21st Century science, and indeed a 30th Century science, from which vantage points our knowledge of the universe may appear quite different than it does to us. We suffer, perhaps, from temporal provincialism, a form of arrogance that has always irritated posterity.

  J. Allen Hynek

  Arrogance, Suffering, Doe

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• Is it not the glory of the people of America, that whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience? To this manly spirit, posterity will be indebted for the possession, and the world for the example of the numerous innovations displayed on the American theatre, in favor of private rights and public happiness.

  James Madison

  Rights, Names, America

  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Quentin P. Taylor, John Jay (1998). “The Essential Federalist: A New Reading of the Federalist Papers”, p.57, Rowman & Littlefield

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• Now is the seedtime of continental union, faith and honor. The least fracture now, will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak; the wound would enlarge with the tree, and posterity read in it full grown characters.

  Thomas Paine

  Character, Names, Tree

  Thomas Paine, John Dos Passos (2008). “The Essential Thomas Paine”, p.65, Courier Corporation

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• The success or failure of a life, as far as posterity goes, seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of escape

  Alice James

  Lying, Failure, Luck

  Alice James (1934). “Her Brothers Her Journal”

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• This theory [the oxygen theory] is not as I have heard it described, that of the French chemists, it is mine (elle est la mienne); it is a property which I claim from my contemporaries and from posterity.

  Antoine Lavoisier

  Science, Oxygen, Biographies

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