Social Heritage Quotes

Well, I was born to people raised in 1889.

My parents never told us that our great-grandmothers had been slaves.

An atmosphere of beliefs and conceptions has been formed by the labours and struggles of our forefathers, which enables us to breathe amid the various and complex circumstances of our life.

In the early '90s or so, I drove my father to Providence, Ky., his hometown, and he was pointing out, 'That's where the doctor's office was,' and 'That's where we bought ice cream.' And he was pointing to empty lots. When you lose communities, what do you have? We often survive by remembering the stories.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

The more people share woodland, absorb it and regard it as part of their personal heritage and culture, the richer our society will be. The more people can work in woods and use them practically rather than go through the motions as a kind of ersatz exercise, the more they will care for the places themselves rather than the political idea of them.

The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.

We are the damaged heirs of a damaged cultural style which has been practiced now for about seven thousand years.

One life stamps and influences another, which in turn stamps and influences another, on and on, until the soul of human experience breathes on in generations we'll never meet.

What is education? Properly speaking, there is no such thing as education. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. Whatever the soul is like, it will have to be passed on somehow, consciously or unconsciously, and that transition may be called education. ... What we need is to have a culture before we hand it down. In other words, it is a truth, however sad and strange, that we cannot give what we have not got, and cannot teach to other people what we do not know ourselves.

History is a novel whose author is the people.

A nation's culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people.

Race, class, and gender in our heritage, in our history as people of America, have intermingled and interpenetrated in dazzling, complex, destructive, and empowering ways. Figuring these ways out constitutes a major preoccupation of the discipline of history.

You were only truly patriotic if you had a laborer for a grandfather and were glad of it.

In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past.

One of the strongest and most persistent elements in national development has been that inheritance of political traditions and usages which the new settlers brought with them.

It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.

I could not cherish London and not value Jewish London. The contribution of Jews to London is immense - politically, economically, culturally, intellectually, philanthropically, artistically.

Without an understanding of history, we are politically, culturally and socially impoverished. If we sacrifice history to economic pressures or to budget cuts, we will lose a part of who we are.

Every one of the constituent elements of a social group, in a modern city as in a savage tribe, is born immature, helpless, without language, beliefs, ideas, or social standards. Each individual, each unit who is the carrier of the life-experience of his group, in time passes away. Yet the life of the group goes on.

Food is all about the story of a people through the ages.

Guns in America have an atavistic force. Possessing them, or the act of not possessing them, is an identity that seems to pass from father to son.

As so often, the ordinary rank and file of the electorate have seen a truth, an important fact, which has escaped so many more clever people - the underlying value of that which is traditional, of that which is prescriptive.