I want to be remembered as iconic and different.

I’m the only person you’ve ever met who has read Longfellow.

That was always the difference between Muhammad Ali and the rest of us. He came, he saw, and if he didn’t entirely conquer – he came as close as anybody we are likely to see in the lifetime of this doomed generation.

If the American people don’t love me, their descendants will.

How many emperors and how many princes have lived and died and no record of them remains, and they only sought to gain dominions and riches in order that their fame might be ever-lasting.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

You are remembered for the rules you break.

Let us endeavor so to live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.

The greatest legacy one can pass on to one’s children and grandchildren is not money or other material things accumulated in one’s life, but rather a legacy of character and faith.

The British nation is unique in this respect. They are the only people who like to be told how bad things are, who like to be told the worst.

And were an epitaph to be my story I’d have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

For my name and memory I leave to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.

When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, ‚I used everything you gave me‘.

There’s nowhere else like London. Nothing at all, anywhere.

In America, there might be better gastronomic destinations than New Orleans, but there is no place more uniquely wonderful.

The men who followed Him were unique in their generation. They turned the world upside down because their hearts had been turned right side up. The world has never been the same.

I haven’t written my own epitaph, and I’m not sure I should. Whatever it is, I hope it will be simple, and that it will point people not to me, but to the One I served.

I don’t think of Kurt as ‚Kurt Cobain from Nirvana‘. I think of him as ‚Kurt‘. It’s something that comes back all the time. Almost every day.

There was a time Michael Jackson couldn’t get his video on MTV because he was considered to be ‚urban.‘ The Michael Jackson. So I literally have to be the Michael Jackson of apparel in order to break down the doors for everyone who will come after I’m gone, after I’m dead.

The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.

The Beatles created something that never trailed off. What a gift that was to their fans. If you’re into the Beatles, you loved them from beginning to end.

The true history of my administration will be written 50 years from now, and you and I will not be around to see it.

My grandfather was one of the very, very first, if not the first, Samoan wrestlers to become known on a worldwide basis.

We can all be successful and make money, but when we die, that ends. But when you are significant is when you help other people be successful. That lasts many a lifetime.

A tomb now suffices him for whom the whole world was not sufficient.

Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.

I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.

I would as soon leave my son a curse as the almighty dollar.

I try to do something the audience might not have seen before. Like if I’m gonna kiss a girl I wanna kiss her like a girl has never been kissed. Like maybe I would kick her legs out from under her and catch her right before she hits the ground and then kiss her.

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.

No legacy is so rich as honesty.

I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.

Democracy is our commitment. It is our great legacy, a legacy we simply cannot compromise. Democracy is in our DNA.

God gave me some weird, beautiful scent that makes men and women go crazy. People compare it to Carvel. It is a whale of a smell.

I love nerdy, cute, quirky boys who don’t take themselves too seriously.

Kitty Wells was the first and only Queen of Country Music, no matter what they call the rest of us. She was a great inspiration to me as well as every other female singer in the country music business. In addition to being a wonderful asset to country music, she was a wonderful woman.

I believe in sketching because there is something very sensitive in sketching, you know, in sketches that you don’t have out of a computer that looks the same like everybody even if, later on, the dresses are OK, but I like to sketch, and I like to see trails made after my sketches that look the same. It is you know, what I like.

Try and leave this world a little better than you found it, and when your turn comes to die, you can die happy in feeling that at any rate, you have not wasted your time but have done your best.

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.

Why should I care about posterity? What’s posterity ever done for me?

You were not created to just get by with an average, unrewarding, or unfulfilling life. God created you to leave your mark on this generation.

I was the first person to have a punk rock hairstyle.

When we build, let us think that we build for ever.

No one can pass through life, any more than he can pass through a bit of country, without leaving tracks behind, and those tracks may often be helpful to those coming after him in finding their way.

The Internet offers opportunities that are more unique than ever before. With TV, I know I’m making 22 minutes; I know there’s a commercial in the middle. With the Internet, no one knows anything. No rules.

The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.

Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.

I always liked different things, rare things.

I replaced the headlights in my car with strobe lights, so it looks like I’m the only one moving.

Honestly, I’d love to be remembered as one of the best to ever pick up a mic, but if I’m doing my part to lessen some racial tension I feel good about what I’m doing.

I don’t believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books.

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

I do like Burial; he’s so curiously clumsy, you can’t help but be moved. It’s so un-Hollywood, and the rhythms are so un-danceable.

Those who know me know I’m passionate about lists, and top of my list of priorities is my family. My wife Joan and I do not consider our legacy to our children to be wealth or fame but the opportunity to pursue happiness by following their own path.

That’s the one for my tombstone… Here lies David Byrne. Why the big suit?

What life half gives a man, posterity gives entirely.

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see – or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.

One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you die before them, just as you plant a tree or build a house knowing, hoping that it will outlive you. That’s how the human species has done as well as it has.

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

The function of posterity is to look after itself.

Old age is not a matter for sorrow. It is matter for thanks if we have left our work done behind us.