119 Heritage Quotes

I'm half-Irish, half-Dutch, and I was born in Belgium. If I was a dog, I'd be in a hell of a mess!

Don't hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them.

I felt there's a wealth in Jewish tradition, a great inheritance. I'd be a jerk not to take advantage of it.

Walk tall, kick ass, learn to speak Arabic, love music and never forget you come from a long line of truth seekers, lovers and warriors.

How to save the old that's worth saving, whether in landscape, houses, manners, institutions, or human types, is one of our greatest problems, and the one that we bother least about.

Our ancestors were very rich and eminent people, and they left us an enormous inheritance, which we have completely forgotten, especially since the time when we began to consider ourselves the descendants of a monkey.

Our heritage and ideals, our code and standards - the things we live by and teach our children - are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.

England! awake! awake! awake! Jerusalem thy sister calls! Why wilt thou sleep the sleep of death And close her from thy ancient walls?

I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief.

The name of 'reform' simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.

I think a lot of what I was taught, gathered, and learned is worth keeping. Heritage and 'wisdom' and simply personal family and local history enrich the one able to tap such information. As it is I wish I had garnered more from my grandparents and parents.

The modern world seems to have no notion of preserving different things side by side, of allowing its proper and proportionate place to each, of saving the whole varied heritage of culture. It has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.

It is so important for me to keep authentic Cuban sounds alive. All of these great artists have changed the landscape of Latin music and it's an honor to have them on this album ['90 Millas,' released in September of 2007]. I believe this album will expose a new generation to the richness of Cuban music.

No invader has ever conquered the heart of Poland, that spirit which is the inheritance of sons and daughters, the private passion of families and the ancient, unbreakable tie to all those who came before.

I feel myself the inheritor of a great background of people. Just who, precisely, they were, I have never known. I might be part Negro, might be part Jew, part Muslim, part Irish. So I can't afford to be supercilious about any group of people because I may be that people.

Liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.

In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man's skin, - seven or eight ancestors at least, - and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is.

Dancing was always part of my culture growing up in Barbados! When I shot my 1st video I worked really hard with my choreographer to perfect the routines!

'I'm proud of where I come from. A lot of people leave Mississippi, and their claim to fame is somewhere else. But I have so many moral values that made me the person I am now.'

O ye by wandering tempest sown 'Neath every alien star, Forget not whence the breath was blown That wafted you afar! For ye are still her ancient seed On younger soil let fall- Children of Britain's island-breed, To whom the Mother in her need Perchance may one day call.

The musci is one of the beautiful things that has survived the Castro regime. I have played for audiences all over the world but I've never played for a Cuban audience. For [husband] Emilio and me, the music is the one tie to our homeland.

One can find in the Yiddish tongue and in the Yiddish spirit expressions of pious joy, lust for life, longing for the Messiah, patience and deep appreciation of human individuality. There is a quiet humor in Yiddish and a gratitude for every day of life, every crumb of success, each encounter of love. The Yiddish mentality is not haughty. It does not take victory for granted. It does not demand and command but it muddles through, sneaks by, smuggles itself amidst the powers of destruction, knowing somewhere that God's plan for Creation is still at the very beginning.

It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives its most distinctive characteristic.

There are places we all come from - deep-rooty-common places - that make us who they are. And we disdain them or treat them lightly at our peril. We turn our backs on them at the risk of self-contempt. There is a sense in which we need to go home again - and can go home again. Not to recover home, no. But to sanctify memory.

My family was musical on both sides. My father's family had a famous flautist and a classical pianist. My mother won a contest to be Shirley Temple's double -- she was the diva of the family. At 8, I learned how to play guitar. I used to play songs from the '20s, '30s and '40s in the kitchen for my grandmother. After my dad was a prisoner in Cuba for two years, we moved to Texas, where I was the only Hispanic in the class. I remember hearing 'Ferry Cross the Mersey,' by Gerry and the Pacemakers, and thinking, 'that had bongos and maracas -- that was really a bolero.' And the Beathles song, 'Till There was You' . . . also Latin. I wrote poetry, which got me into lyrics. Stevie Wonder, Carole King, Elton John pulled me into pop. I started singing with a band -- just for fun -- when I 17. And pretty soon, I was thinking I could sing pop in English as well as Spanish. And as you know, we did that and we broke through. But we waited until 1993 to release 'Mi Tierra' -- we wanted my fans to be rady for the traditional Cuban music. And then we kept adding: more Cuban influences, more Latin America. And, underneath it all, African drums and rhythm. The concept of '90 Millas' starts with the songs of the '40s. We invited 25 masters of Latin music -- giants on the cutting edge of creativity, musicians who pushed it out to the world, young Cuban artists and Puerto Ricans who are huge -- so we could blend cultures and generations. So it is like coming home, but not exactly to the old Cuba.

More than anything I want to be able to go back to Cuba, to have a house to visit there, to know my roots. I lost my father as a little girl, and I want to be able to find him again in my heritage.

Some say the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice/I say the darker the flesh then the deeper the roots/I give a holler to my sisters on welfare/Tupac cares, and don't nobody else care

A few days ago I was in Eisenach and stood on top of the Wartburg, where a great German [Martin Luther] once translated the Bible.

They cherish his mem'ry, and them as sell picturs of his birthplace, etc., make it prof'tible cherishin' it.

In Brazil we have had Emerson (Fittipaldi), (Jose) Carlos Pace, and now it's me. After me there will be another one. This is unrefusable.

These people, scattered all over the country, a few of them on the continent, were much like normal people. To outsiders, their relationship was not apparent; they certainly never revealed it; they never met. They became traders, captains of ships that traded with the Indies, soldiers, parliamentarians, agriculturists; some plunged into, some avoided, the constitutional struggles that dogged most of the seventeenth century. But they were all - male or female - Franks. They had the inexpressible benefit of their progenitor's one hundred and seventy-odd years' experience, and not only of his, but of all the other Franks. It was small wonder that, with few exceptions, whatever they did they prospered.

'I'm so in the world of Nina Simone, Etta James, Billie Holiday and Eartha Kitt, one of the original bad girls.'

Tradition is not, as post-modernists maintain, a library or museum the artist plunders. It is the endless conversation between the living and the dead. Young artists enter into this conversation passionately - not merely intellectually, though study and analysis play a part. They live and breathe it. Tradition is not a public building. It is a love affair.

There is no design involved. It would look tawdry down the wrong end of a beach in Torremolinos. This isn't a case of just not wanting it in my backyard. This area is historically significant with listed buildings and it's next to the Tower of London, which is a world heritage site.

'Temples have been desecrated, places of worship are destroyed, all in the prejudice view that one religion is the true one and others are not.'

Let us return to our eagle's nest in the Himalayas. It is waiting for us, for it is ours, eaglets of Europe, we need not renounce any part of our real nature...whence we formerly took our flight.

America was founded by men who understood that the threat of domestic tyranny is as great as any threat from abroad. If we want to be worthy of their legacy, we must resist the rush toward ever-increasing state control of our society. Otherwise, our own government will become a greater threat to our freedoms than any foreign terrorist.

The west has always shown a sympathetic, although patronizing, appreciation of the old Japan. Many a foreign observer would remark with a sigh: 'What a pity that things of the past, of beauty and joy forever, should be so mercilessly sacrificed on the altar of modernism!'

We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents, and sort them, to unify them. They will be found ampler than has been supposed, and in widely different sources. Thus far, impress'd by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States has been fashion'd from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only - which is a very great mistake.