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

No one who knew Diana will ever forget her. Millions of others who never met her, but felt they knew her, will remember her.

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.

My grandpa was a preacher.

I don’t need a successor, only willing hands to accept the torch for a new generation.

Every President I think I’ve ever known, except Truman, has thought they didn’t quite get done what they wanted done. And toward the end of their Administrations, they were disappointed and wished they had done some things differently.

Whatever your life’s work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.

To spend life for something which outlasts it.

I don’t know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be.

I have certain guys who I looked up to. Jordan, Kobe, those guys. Passing that on to doing my part to kind of keep that influence of basketball where it should be is kind of why I play the game.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

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

Everybody loves you when you’re six foot in the ground.

If you carefully consider what you want to be said of you in the funeral experience, you will find your definition of success.

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

Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.

No legacy is so rich as honesty.

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.

June Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spoke up, and led her students, whom she adored, to do the same.

Most people don’t grow up. It’s too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That’s the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don’t grow up.

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.

You’re dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway.

My mother fought cancer for almost a decade and died at 56. She held out long enough to meet the first of her grandchildren and to hold them in her arms. But my other children will never have the chance to know her and experience how loving and gracious she was.

I have somewhere met with the epitaph on a charitable man which has pleased me very much. I cannot recollect the words, but here is the sense of it: ‚What I spent I lost; what I possessed is left to others; what I gave away remains with me.‘

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.

I want to be remembered as iconic and different.

You drown not by falling into a river, but by staying submerged in it.

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

I have done for my country, and for all mankind, all that I could do, and I now resign my soul, without fear, to my God – my daughter to my country.

We are always doing something for posterity, but I would fain see posterity do something for us.

I would like to be remembered as someone who did the best she could with the talent she had.

The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it.

Live to learn, and you will really learn to live.

Soon, I’ll be like all the others. The time will come for all of us, but the ideas of the Cuban Communists will remain.

A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.

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.

Do right. Do your best. Treat others as you want to be treated.

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. ‚Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after you.

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

My family’s lineage, we are warriors. The McGregor clan, we are warriors all through. We are famous all through the world for our fighting capabilities of all generations. So I have no doubt that’s stood to me and that led me down this path and gave me what I have.

I used to have nightmares that they would put ‚He played Ted‘ on my tombstone.

Great men, unknown to their generation, have their fame among the great who have preceded them, and all true worldly fame subsides from their high estimate beyond the stars.

But I’ve got to think of myself as the luckiest guy. Robert Johnson only had one album’s worth of work as his legacy. That’s all that life allowed him.

No matter what happens in life, be good to people. Being good to people is a wonderful legacy to leave behind.

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.

Actually oddly enough, I think my work, the activism, will be forgotten. And I hope it will. Because I hope those problems will have gone away.

I owe everything to Nirvana. But I can’t let that overshadow the future. For the first few years, I didn’t even want to talk about Nirvana. Partly because it was just painful to talk about losing Kurt but also because I wanted the Foo Fighters to mean something.

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.

We will be remembered only if we give to our younger generation a prosperous and safe India, resulting out of economic prosperity coupled with civilizational heritage.

Edison failed 10,000 times before he made the electric light. Do not be discouraged if you fail a few times.

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

I don’t want to have lived in vain like most people. I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met. I want to go on living even after my death!

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

Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

My songs are like my children – I expect them to support me when I’m old.

Let us be sure that those who come after will say of us in our time, that in our time we did everything that could be done. We finished the race; we kept them free; we kept the faith.

The ideal death, I think, is what was the ideal Victorian death, you know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.

Legacy is a stupid thing! I don’t want a legacy.

By the time I was 23 years old, I had multiple arrests.

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.

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