Top 100 Quotes About Posterity
#1. Art is always in the eyes of the beholder. Only posterity has the right to point out our mistakes.
Len Wein
#2. Anybody who talks about the future is a bastard, it's the present that counts. Invoking posterity is like making speeches to worms.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#4. I would give no thought of what the world might say of me, if I could only transmit to posterity the reputation of an honest man.
Sam Houston
#6. The planting of a tree, especially one of the long-living hardwood trees, is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if the tree takes root it will far outlive the visible effect of any of your other actions, good or evil.
George Orwell
#7. How could he deny the jewels of posterity within his loins?
Frank Herbert
#8. We, who pay dearly for every breath of pure, fresh air, must guard against the tendency to fetter the future. If we succeed in clearing the soil from the rubbish of the past and present, we will leave to posterity the greatest and safest heritage of all ages.
Emma Goldman
#9. Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.
James Joyce
#10. I work for posterity, these things requiring ages for their accomplishment.
Francis Bacon
#11. My brave fellows, let no sensation of satisfaction for the triumphs you have gained induce you to insult your fallen enemy. Let no shouting, no clamorous huzzaing increase their mortification. It is sufficient for us that we witness their humiliation. Posterity will huzza for us.
George Washington
#12. 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
#13. 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
#15. People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.
Edmund Burke
#16. If you never look just wrong to your contemporaries you will never look just right to posterity every writer has to try to be, to some extent, sometimes, a law unto himself.
Randall Jarrell
#17. We must seek the truth, love it, defend it, and hand it down uncorrupted to our posterity.
Philipp Melanchthon
#18. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught - nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!
Herman Melville
#19. To this day I have a profound mistrust of the word processor. I have to type it or write it first, screen it and only then enter it for posterity onto the word processor.
Shane Black
#20. In writing like this, he was letting truth from beyond time into history, and thus making history the handmaid of posterity and not its governor ...
Philip Pullman
#21. This poem will never reach its destination. On Rousseau's Ode To Posterity
Voltaire
#22. You stand before a god! Speak your eloquence for all posterity. Be Profound!"
"Profound ... huh." Temper was silent for a long moment, studying the cobbles of the alley mouth. And then he lifted his helmed head faced Shadowthrone, and said "Fuck off.
Steven Erikson
#23. The allegory of Adam and Eve eating of the tree of evil, and entailing upon their posterity the wrath of God and the loss of everlasting life, admits of no other explanation than the disease and crime that have flowed from unnatural diet.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#24. Posterity! Why should people be less stupid tomorrow than they are today?
Jules Renard
#25. Think of it. To go down to posterity as a 'man who lived among the cannibals.'
Herman Melville
#26. They tore Joseph coat of many colors as evidence of his death and dreams but God brought together his life for his People, to prepare them posterity
Ikechukwu Joseph
#27. Because men really respect only that which was founded of old and has developed slowly, he who wants to live on after his death must take care not only of his posterity but even more of his past.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#28. Capricious and unfaithful, the king wished to be called Louis the Just and Louis the Chaste. Posterity will find a difficulty in understanding this character, which history explains only by facts and never by reason.
Alexandre Dumas
#29. But hereby resolve to write in this book at least twenty minutes a night. (If discouraged, just think of how much will have been recorded for posterity after one mere year!) (September 5) Oops. Missed a day.
George Saunders
#30. The noblest contribution which any man can make for the benefit of posterity, is that of character. The richest bequest which any man can leave to the youth of his native land, is that of a shining, spotless example.
Robert Charles Winthrop
#31. But say, my lord, it were not regist'red,
Methinks the truth should live from age to age,
As 'twere retailed to all posterity,
Even to the general all-ending day.
William Shakespeare
#32. We have reached a little altitude where we may look down upon the Indian Thugs with a complacent shudder; and we may even hope for a day, many centuries hence, when our posterity will look down upon us in the same way.
Mark Twain
#34. This I regard as history's highest function, to let no worthy action be uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds.
Tacitus
#35. Certainly on a political and a legislative level, Bill Clinton was effective, but the example that he ultimately left, I think for posterity, tragically, is going to begin with that single paragraph lead with the White House intern.
Joe Eszterhas
#36. In fact, Darwin's own grandfather anticipated the central tenet of Lamarckism by some seven years: "All animals undergo perpetual transformations; which are in part produced by their own exertions ... and many of these acquired forms or propensities are transmitted to their posterity."
Erasmus Darwin
#37. Among the sentiments of most powerful operation upon the human heart, and most highly honorable to the human character, are those of veneration for our forefathers and of love for our posterity.
John Quincy Adams
#38. 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
#39. What is thy body but a swallowing grave,
Seeming to bury that posterity
Which, by the rights of time, thou needs must have
If thou destroy them not in dark obscurity?
If so, the world will hold thee in disdain,
Sith in thy pride so fair a hope is slain.
William Shakespeare
#40. There is a certain virtue in every good man, which night and day stirs up the mind with the stimulus of glory, and reminds it that all mention of our name will not cease at the same time with our lives, but that our fame will endure to all posterity.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#41. After all, it is style alone by which posterity will judge of a great work, for an author can have nothing truly his own but his style.
Isaac D'Israeli
#42. Posterity will one day laugh at the foolishness of modern materialistic philosophers.
Louis Pasteur
#43. He who only writes to suit the taste of the age, considers himself more than his writings. We should always aim at perfection, and then posterity will do us that justice which sometimes our contemporaries refuse us.
Jean De La Bruyere
#45. We already have posterity," I said.
"When?'
"We were babies and we grew old
Edwidge Danticat
#46. Posterity shall know of me even less than I shall know of posterity.
W.S. Gilbert
#47. We are always doing something for posterity, but I would fain see posterity do something for us.
Joseph Addison
#48. Posterity preserves only what will pack into small compass. Jewels are handed down from age to age; less portable valuables disappear.
Arthur Penrhyn Stanley
#49. Posterity will talk of Washington as the founder of a great empire, when my name shall be lost in the vortex of revolution.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#50. Posterity
the forlorn child of nineteenth century optimism
grows ever harder to conceive.
Mason Cooley
#51. We never thought we were writing for posterity, because at the time everyone assumed that all the great standards had already been written by Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein ... The songs we were writing were supposed to be temporary things, of the period, like comic books.
Mike Stoller
#52. Hence, let us place there, carved high, as close to heaven as we can, the words of our leaders, their faces, to show posterity what manner of men they were. Then breathe a prayer that these records will endure until the wind and rain alone shall wear them away.
Gutzon Borglum
#53. I just find that there's something about looking back on interviews, whether for purposes of remembering what I said about something or if it's for posterity when I'm 75.
Zachary Quinto
#54. - Most distinguished voyager, what was your eon like?
- Comic. Terror is forgotten.
Only the ridiculous is remembered by posterity.
Death from a wound, from a noose, from starvation
Is one death, but folly is uncounted and new every year.
Czeslaw Milosz
#55. As though there were a tie And obligation to posterity. We get them, bear them, breed, and nurse: What has posterity done for us. That we, lest they their rights should lose, Should trust our necks to gripe of noose?
John Trumbull
#56. Posterity always degenerates till it becomes our ancestors.
Horace Walpole
#57. Such as have reason, understanding, or common sense, will, and ought to make use of it in those things that concern themselves and their posterity, and suspect the words of such as are interested in deceiving or persuading them not to see with their own eyes.
Algernon Sidney
#58. Is it no imputation to be arraigned before this House, in which I have sat forty years, and to have my name transmitted to posterity with disgrace and infamy?
Robert Walpole
#59. We should not miss the present opportunity or we shall be blamed by posterity.
Shunroku Hata
#60. Posterity will call you the great emancipator, a more enviable title than any crown could be, and greater than any merely mundane treasure.
Giuseppe Garibaldi
#61. Would a writer know how to behave himself with relation td posterity? Let him consider in old books what he finds that he is glad to know, and what omissions he most laments.
Jonathan Swift
#62. This I hold to be the chief office of history, to rescue virtuous actions from the oblivion to which a want of records would consign them, and that men should feel a dread of being considered infamous in the opinions of posterity, from their depraved expressions and base actions.
Tacitus
#63. The honour of parents is a fair and noble treasure to their posterity, but to have the use of a treasure of wealth and honour, and to leave none to your successors, because you have neither money nor reputation of your own, is alike base and dishonourable.
Plato
#64. If the testimony by which the Jews were assured of the salvation of their posterity is taken away from us, the coming of Christ would have the effect of making God's grace more obscure and less well attested to us than it was to the Jews before us.
John Calvin
#65. We are too careless of posterity; not considering that as they are, so the next generation will be.
William Penn
#67. You are writing for your contemporaries - not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.
Joyce Carol Oates
#68. Be what you wish your children to be. Parents have perpetuated by precept and example their own stamp of character to their posterity.
Ellen G. White
#69. Other men are known to posterity only through the medium of history, which is continually growing faint and obscure; but the intercourse between the author and his fellow-men is ever new,
active, and immediate.
Washington Irving
#70. Every generation is a secret society and has incommunicable enthusiasms, tastes, and interests which are a mystery both to its predecessors and to posterity.
John Jay Chapman
#71. Posterity who are to reap the blessings will scarcely be able to conceive the hardships and sufferings of their ancestors.
Abigail Adams
#73. When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.
Thomas Paine
#74. Posterity will one day laugh at the sublime foolishness of the modern materialistic philosophy. The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator. I pray while I am engaged at my work in the laboratory.
Louis Pasteur
#75. Picasso is what is going to happen and what is happening; he is posterity and archaic time, the distant ancestor and our next-door neighbor. Speed permits him to be two places at once, to belong to all the centuries without letting go of the here and now.
Octavio Paz
#76. Some writers refuse to lay their heads peaceably on the pillow of literary history in order to give posterity good dreams.
review in London Review of Books, of the works of Knut Hamsun (26 nov 1998)
James Wood
#77. Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.
P.D. James
#78. I hate posterity - it's so fond of having the last word.
Saki
#79. It was puzzling to own trees - they were not owned the way a business os owned or even a house is owned. If anything, they were held in trust. In trust. Yes, for all of posterity, ...
Philip Roth
#80. Why should I care about posterity? What's posterity ever done for me?
Groucho Marx
#81. I believe the man who will go down in posterity is the man who paints his own time and the scenes of everyday life around him.
Childe Hassam
#82. If conquest does not bind posterity, so neither can compact bind it.
Charlotte Smith
#83. 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 IN HARPER'S WEEKLY, MAY 24, 1883
David McCullough
#84. Posterity
you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.
John Quincy Adams
#85. Verbal representations of such places or scenes may, or may not, have the merit of accuracy; but photographic presentments of them will be accepted by posterity with an undoubting faith.
Alexander Gardner
#86. We must not look at the past with the enormous condescension of posterity.
E.P. Thompson
#87. The ultimate treasures on earth and in heaven are our children and our posterity.
Dallin H. Oaks
#88. Shame on the men who can court exemption from present trouble and expense at the price of their own posterity's liberty!
Samuel Adams
#89. We should, if possible, prove a teacher to posterity, instead of being the pupil of by-gone generations. More shall come after us than have gone before; the world is not yet middle-aged.
Herman Melville
#90. Posterity will surely be amazed, and I hope vastly amused, that such slipshod and unconvincing theorizing should have so easily captivated twentieth-century minds and been so widely and recklessly applied.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#91. What a father says to his children is not heard by the world, but it will be heard by posterity.
Jean Paul
#92. Posterity will know as little of me as I know of posterity.
W.S. Gilbert
#93. He wouldn't perform without a recording now, she was certain, like a poet working in the oral tradition who had been contaminated by the advent of the recording device and so insisted that all improvisations be saved for posterity.
David Cronenberg
#94. We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the eclat of a proverb.
Jane Austen
#95. The glorious memory of brave men is continually renewed; the fame of those who have performed any noble deed is never allowed to die; and the renown of those who have done good service to their country becomes a matter of common knowledge to the multitude, and part of the heritage of posterity.
Polybius
#96. I don't want to be the biggest superstar. I want to be good at my job, and I want my work to go down in posterity. I am working for the longevity of my career.
Sonam Kapoor
#97. Into this, for good or ill, is woven every belief of every man who has speech of his fellows. A awful privilege, and an awful responsibility, that we should help to create the world in which posterity will live.
William Kingdon Clifford
#98. Few can be induced to labor exclusively for posterity; and none will do it enthusiastically. Posterity has done nothing for us; and theorize on it as we may, practically we shall do very little for it, unless we are made to think we are at the same time doing something for ourselves.
Abraham Lincoln
#99. How posterity will laugh at us, one way or other! If half a dozen break their necks, and balloonism is exploded, we shall be called fools for having imagined it could be brought to use: if it should be turned to account, we shall be ridiculed for having doubted.
Horace Walpole
#100. The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.
Jorge Luis Borges
