Quotes
Quotes about Posterity
Think of your forefathers! Think of your posterity!
He thinks posterity is a pack-horse, always ready to be loaded.
Posterity is a most limited assembly. Those gentlemen who reach posterity are not much more numerous than the planets.
What dazzles, for the moment spends its spirit; What's genuine, shall posterity inherit. [Ger., Was glanzt ist fur den Augenblick geboren; Das Aechte bleibt der Nachwelt unverloren.]
As to posterity, I may ask (with somebody whom I have forgot) what has it ever done to oblige me?
Posterity, thinned by the crime of its ancestors, shall hear of those battles. [Lat., Audiet pugnas, vitio parentum Rara juventus.]
The man was laughed at as a blunderer who said in a public business: "we do much for posterity; I would fain see them do something for us."
Why should we put ourselves out of our way to do anything for posterity; for what has posterity done for us?
Posterity pays for the sins of their fathers. [Lat., Culpam majorum posteri luunt.]
Why do you ask, how long has he lived? He has lived to posterity. [Lat., Quid quaeris, quamdiu visit? Vixit ad posteros.]
We are always doing, says he, something for Posterity, but I would fain see Posterity do something for us.
Posterity gives to every man his true honor. [Lat., Suum cuique decus posteritas rependet.]
A foreign nation is a kind of contemporaneous posterity.
It is the privilege of posterity to set matters right between those antagonists who, by their rivalry for greatness, divided a whole age.
What cities, as great as this, have . . . promised themselves immortality! Posterity can hardly trace the situation of some. The sorrowful traveller wanders over the awful ruins of others others. . . . Here stood their citadel, but now grown over with weeds; there their senate-house, but now the haunt of every noxious reptile; temples and theatres stood here, now only an undistinguished heap of ruins.
And, 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.
