Legacy Assessment Quotes

At the end of the day, I don't think I am going to be judged by what happened in the 90's and 2000's, at the end of the day my career will be judged from beginning to end and everything in between.

As for my conduct in public office, my compatriots, as is usually the case, will divide their opinions; their children will render true judgment.

Empires inevitably fall, and when they do, history judges them for the legacies they leave behind.

I'm coming to the end of my life. I do reflect on what I've done for the 85 years that I have been given so far. And I'm proud of what I've done.

When we come to the last moment of this lifetime and we look back across it, the only thing that's going to matter is 'What is the quality of our love?'

I don't want to give myself grades. I will leave evaluation of my achievements to history.

Sure, Obama is personally popular, but the same cannot be said for his policies or his legacy.

Perhaps we should wait until his second term begins before carving Barack Obama's face in Mount Rushmore. Is that asking too much?

History and the generations to come will judge our leaders by the decisions they make in the coming weeks.

There are people who will appreciate what I've done, and there will be people who will criticize me. Ultimately history will have the final say.

It’s irrelevant to me what young Singaporeans think of me. What they think of me after I’m dead and gone in one generation will be determined by researchers who do PhDs on me, right? So there will be a lot of revisionism. As people revised Stalin, Brezhnev and one day now Yeltsin, and later on Putin. I’ve lived long enough to know that you may be idealised in life and reviled after you’re dead.

Some might think that George W. Bush had his shortcomings, but let me tell you something - history's going to be kind to George W. Bush.

Sometimes a President seems greater after he has left office than while he was in it.

Although this should not be so, historians reconsider presidencies based on how the presidents conduct themselves after leaving office.

All the past is here, present to be tried; let it approve itself if it can.

When a writer dies you get a higher standard of obituary.

In the firm expectation that when London shall be a habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh, when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some Transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges and their historians.

In the ultimate analysis, all of us would have served Pakistan better if history and our future generations judge us positively.

In the last analysis, the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius; he will have to wait for the verdict of posterity.

The weird thing about rap is that you don't get compared in the same way that athletes do, even though it's probably the most competitive sport in music. In basketball, they look at a player and say: 'This guy was the best in his prime at this sport.' But in rap it's not until you're dead or retired that people think about it like that.

I spend a good deal of time wondering how we will seem to the people who come after us. This is not an idle interest, but a deliberate attempt to strengthen the power of that "other eye," which we can use to judge ourselves.

We do not know which of our silver products will be judged as gold by our successors, nor does it matter.

It is very singular how the fact of a man's death often seems to give people a truer idea of his character, whether for good or evil, than they have ever possessed while he was living and acting among them.

Without the connotation good or bad, bin Laden's a great man in the sense that he's influenced the course of history.

The true test of any scholar's work is not what his contemporaries say, but what happens to his work in the next 25 or 50 years.