Cultural Legacy Quotes

Mankind is the grandest and surest artist of all, and history as it clarifies is, in pure fact, an artistic process, a creation in its fullness of the beautiful soul.

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.

Being a part of 'Sex and the City' was like being at the center of the universe - it was extraordinary.

Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

Never can the innate power of a work be hidden or locked away. A work of art can be forgotten by time; it can be forbidden and rejected but the elemental will always prevail over the ephemeral.

All great popular literature today one day will be seen as great literature and will no longer be seen as popular literature.

What do I think of Western civilization? I think it would be a very good idea.

Turkey was never colonized by the Western powers and consequently Turks do not have the resentment of the West that other Moslem nations have.

There is no nation in the world greater, older or more honorable than the Turkish nation, nor has one been seen in the history of humanity.

When I wrote 'The Alexandria Link,' I discovered that we are only aware of about 10 percent of the knowledge of the ancient world. In the ancient world, most of the knowledge was destroyed. Every emperor of China who came in wiped out everything that came before them, to the point that the country completely forgot its past.

Generations hence, parents will take their children to these woods to show them how the land must have looked to the first Pilgrims and pioneers. And as Americans wander through these forests, climb these mountains, they will sense the love and majesty of the Creator of all of that.

Every other species of talent carries with it its eternity; we enjoy the work of the poet, the painter, the sculptor, only as thousands will do after us; but the actor - his memory is with his generation, and that passes away.

Be as proud of your race today as our as our fathers were in days of yore. We have beautiful history, and we shall create another in the future that will astonish the world.

Like a lot of Irish households we read a lot of Irish history. It was almost Soviet, raising the next generation with a mythic view of their history.

Happy is the nation without a history.

The dead made this world. We didn't make it. They made the poetry and the songs and the customs.

Leonard Cohen kept his Jew name. He's so cool. It's too bad he died.

Still often interventionist, convinced of our importance in the world, even those of us born long after 1900 live in a country that is much more Victorian than we think.

This [American] empire will not last. No empire does. If empires lasted, the whole world would be speaking ancient Persian today.

Every authentic work of art is a gift offered to the future.

Hunting is a family thing for me, and it's a Texas thing. We have a lot of land in Texas that's been in our family for 12 generations.