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posterity
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  • I was hoping someone might write it down for posterity, but no one did.†   (source)
  • A photographer was hoisted above the parking lot by a crane, ready to record the human C-O-K-E for posterity.†   (source)
  • He knew that Hitler would be in favor of anything that might astonish posterity.†   (source)
  • She breathed deep, and bottled it up for posterity.†   (source)
  • Let me set the scene, because it deserves setting for posterity (no, please, I'm not that far gone, posterity! feh).†   (source)
  • A few days later he worked up a definition of his own and put it on the blackboard to be copied for posterity.†   (source)
  • "He wants us to make sure we bring a videotape," she said, "so we can save our own copy for posterity."†   (source)
  • Well, to hear the Post tell it, we lynch 'em for breakfast; the Journal doesn't care; and the Times is so wrapped up in its duty to posterity it bores you to death.†   (source)
  • I want this story to be there for posterity when I die.†   (source)
  • This is for posterity, remember.†   (source)
  • I have no doubt that posterity will pronounce that I was innocent and that the criminals that should have been brought before this court are the members of the government.†   (source)
  • He couldn't dazzle her if she wasn't even there to answer the phone, and he certainly wasn't going to have his ramblings recorded on her answering machine for posterity.†   (source)
  • My body might grow and age and I would soon have more knowledge and experience, but all that was me, all that was Marion, the part that saw and registered the world and chronicled it in an inner ledger for posterity, was well seated inside my body and never more so than at that moment, robbed of eyes and hands.†   (source)
  • Cesar made his way to Angel, and when his young pitcher saw him, he leaped into Cesar's arms as photographers captured the moment for posterity.†   (source)
  • There below him was poor Captain Roberts, drifting gently down toward posterity.†   (source)
  • It is a noble cause we are engaged in, it is the cause of virtue and mankind, every temporal advantage and comfort to us, and our posterity depends upon the vigor of our exertions….†   (source)
  • We only know about Charlemagne and Napoléon because they fought their way into posterity.†   (source)
  • Flashbulbs pop as photographers capture the moment for posterity.†   (source)
  • This sample of soldiers is, of course, biased toward the groups most likely to write letters or diaries and to save them for posterity to read.†   (source)
  • Posterity will be indebted to the American spirit for its many innovations that improve private rights and public happiness.†   (source)
  • And just when the sensitive subway guard's problems are getting the best of him, destroying his faith in Mankind and the Little People, his nine-year-old niece comes home from school and gives him some nice, pat chauvinistic philosophy handed down to us through posterity and P.S. 564 all the way from Andrew Jackson's backwoods wife.†   (source)
  • Their faces command relatives in foreign lands-"Send money"-and posterity forever-"Put food in front of this picture."†   (source)
  • The General glanced at it and said, "Do you realize that everything said in this room is being recorded for posterity?"†   (source)
  • I wanted the yearbook to record for posterity that I had once had flaming ambition, but I could think of nothing very exciting.†   (source)
  • We have no idea of the value posterity will place on the events we attempt to chronicle.†   (source)
  • Not to posterity.†   (source)
  • Posterity will pillory the Bourbons of the commissarocracy together with their dirty deeds.†   (source)
  • Point me to one who will dare do it and I will show you one who will dare the infamy of posterity.†   (source)
  • Let me set the scene, because now it really is for posterity.†   (source)
  • The tabloids have dubbed it for posterity.†   (source)
  • Let us remember what is due to ourselves and our posterity as well as to them.†   (source)
  • As we play our part posterity will bless or curse us.†   (source)
  • So why did they place their fortunes and their posterity in the hands of one illustrious citizen?†   (source)
  • What we are to see God knows, and I leave it to him and his agents in posterity.†   (source)
  • They will not justify to himself, to his country, or to his posterity, an improper vote.†   (source)
  • Infamous I say, for so they will be to all posterity.†   (source)
  • Do not, therefore, my friend, misunderstand me and misrepresent me to posterity.†   (source)
  • Often each was writing as much for posterity as for the other.†   (source)
  • Let not our posterity be deluded with fictions under the pretense of poetical or graphical license.†   (source)
  • He certainly viewed it as providential that when Socrates held forth in the agora and Jesus on the Mount, someone in the audience had the presence of mind to set their words down for posterity.†   (source)
  • "The third word in the next line," explained Baba, "was worn off the slab, its meaning washed away by centuries of rain, almost lost to posterity forever.†   (source)
  • Thus I left instructions that upon my death my poems were to be buried with me, unpublished, and that only when posterity realized my genius, realized that hundreds of my verses had been lost—lost?†   (source)
  • I worry about posterity in general.†   (source)
  • And I explained that, given the fragility of the genius poetical, I would henceforth write not for them, but only for myself and posterity, and that I should, as long as I lived, publish no more poems—for them!†   (source)
  • Posterity who are to reap the blessings will scarcely be able to conceive the hardships and sufferings of their ancestors.†   (source)
  • In it, he writes his reflections on killing Lincoln, just to make sure that his point of view is properly recorded for posterity.†   (source)
  • But the main explanation probably is that the families of soldiers killed in action were the most likely to preserve their memory and therefore their letters for posterity—and for the historian.†   (source)
  • One exterior wall adjacent to the portico was unveiled to reveal an inscription of the boys' names and victories carved into the stone for posterity.†   (source)
  • The future happiness or misery of a great proportion of the human race is at stake—and if we make a wrong choice, ourselves and our posterity must be wretched.†   (source)
  • Justifying to his wife a decision to stay in the army after more than a year's fighting instead of accepting a medical discharge, a thirty-three-year-old Minnesota sergeant, father of three children, wrote home from an army hospital where he was recovering from exhaustion: "My grandfather fought and risked his life to bequeath to his posterity …. the glorious Institutions" now threatened by "this infernal rebellion….†   (source)
  • Remember officers and soldiers that you are free men, fighting for the blessings of liberty— that slavery will be your portion, and that of your posterity, if you do not acquit yourselves like men.†   (source)
  • We, THE PEOPLE of the United States, to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.†   (source)
  • Those pages in the annals of America will record your title to be a conspicuous place in the temple of fame, which shall inform posterity, that under your directions, an undisciplined band of husbandmen, in the course of a few months, became soldiers.†   (source)
  • I have often thought how much happier I should have been if, instead of accepting of a command under such circumstances, I had taken my musket upon my shoulders and entered the ranks, or, if I could have justified the measure to posterity, and my own conscience, had retired to the back country, and lived in a wigwam.†   (source)
  • "The great being who watches the hearts of the children of men, knows I value you above every blessing, and for that reason I wish you to be at such a distance from the horrid scenes of war," Knox wrote to Lucy after she reached Connecticut, and lest anyone forget all that was at stake, he reminded her, "We are fighting for our country, for posterity perhaps.†   (source)
  • The few traces that remain of me must, I believe, go down to posterity in much confusion and distraction, as my life has passed.†   (source)
  • Never was a cause more important or glorious than that which you are engaged in; not only your wives, your children, and distant posterity, but humanity at large, the world of mankind, are interested in it; for if tyranny should prevail in this great country, we may expect liberty will expire throughout the world.†   (source)
  • "I shrink and tremble at the importance of our present conductthe weight absolute without alleviation of perhaps posterity on the shoulders of the present army, an army, I am sorry to say, [that] is not sufficiently numerous to resist the formidable attacks which will probably be made," he told his brother in a letter of August 5.†   (source)
  • "Whether you or I were right posterity must judge," Adams would observe equably, then launch headlong into what he thought.†   (source)
  • Deeply hurt, Adams had written an extraordinary reply, a dissertation on the subject of vanity set forth in his clearest, plainest hand, as if intended for posterity as much as for Gerry.†   (source)
  • Rush wrote to Jefferson to assure him that posterity would acclaim the reconciliation and that Jefferson was certain to find Adams a refreshing correspondent.†   (source)
  • To Abigail he would later write, "I have been so strangely used in this country, so belied and so undefended that I was determined to say some things as an appeal to posterity."†   (source)
  • This stone and several others [it read] have been placed in this yard by a great, great, grandson from a veneration of the piety, humility, simplicity, prudence, frugality, industry and perseverance of his ancestors in hopes of recommending an affirmation of their virtues to their posterity.†   (source)
  • Late in November, Adams submitted to one further ordeal for the sake of posterity, when an itinerant sculptor named John Henry Browere appeared at Quincy to make a life mask by a secret process of his own invention.†   (source)
  • But this, he was quick to add, was a rule with definite limitations, "for there are times when the cause of religion, of government, of liberty, the interest of the present age of posterity, render it a necessary duty to make known his sentiments and intentions boldly and publicly."†   (source)
  • These colonists have paid a premium of sixteen thousand four hundred per person-not counting exempt or co-opted members-for the privilege of seeking their fortunes and protecting their posterity by moving to New Canaan.†   (source)
  • "It is extremely important," he informed her in the presence of the village, "that we have a full record of these pioneer days for posterity.†   (source)
  • ["This answer," wrote Benton in later years, "given on that day and on that spot, is one of the incidents of his life which Mr. Benton will wish posterity to remember.†   (source)
  • Must men conscientiously risk their careers only for principles which hindsight declares to be correct, in order for posterity to honor them for their valor?†   (source)
  • His re-election impossible, Fowler quietly retired from the Senate at the close of his term two years later, but not without a single statement in defense of his vote: "I acted for my country and posterity in obedience to the will of God."†   (source)
  • In a lonely grave, forgotten and unknown, lies "the man who saved a President," and who as a result may well have preserved for ourselves and posterity Constitutional government in the United States—the man who performed in 1868 what one historian has called "the most heroic act in American history, incomparably more difficult than any deed of valor upon the field of battle"—but a United States Senator whose name no one recalls: Edmund G. Ross of Kansas.†   (source)
  • They were executed, and their fate was recorded in the Party histories, a warning to posterity.†   (source)
  • I wandered off downstairs and left them preparing the documents for posterity.†   (source)
  • You mean a name, and fame with posterity?†   (source)
  • You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston.†   (source)
  • And do you think that all true and real men have been famous and known to posterity?†   (source)
  • His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him.†   (source)
  • Yet many critics have accused her of keeping one eye on posterity and point to a number of letters that have all the air of being bravura pieces.†   (source)
  • For the rest, he went about and composed parodies, which, with a devil's grin, he told himself would split the sides of posterity.†   (source)
  • We kept the house, what part of it we lived in, used; we kept the room which Thomas Sutpen would return to—not that one which be left, a husband, but the one to which he should return a sonless widower, barren of that posterity which he doubtless must have wanted who had gone to the trouble and expense of getting children and housing them among imported furniture beneath crystal chandeliers—just as we kept Henry's room, as Judith and Clytie kept it that is, as if he had not run up the…†   (source)
  • …he was still bemused in that state in which he struggled to hold clear and free above a maelstrom of unpredictable and unreasoning human beings, not his head for breath and not so much his fifty years of effort and striving to establish a posterity, but his code of logic and morality, his formula and recipe of fact and deduction whose balanced sum and product declined, refused to swim or even float; —saw him approach the Holston House and saw old Mr McCaslin and two other old men…†   (source)
  • Posterity will never hear of you.†   (source)
  • …for clerk and who knows maybe what delusions of making money out of the store to rebuild the plantation; who had escaped twice now, got himself into it and been freed by the Creditor who set his children to destroying one another before he had posterity, and he decided that maybe he was wrong in being free and so got into it again and then decided that he was wrong in being unfree and so got out of it again—and then turned right around and bought his way back into it with beads and…†   (source)
  • In eternity there is no posterity.†   (source)
  • But the image of every true act, the strength of every true feeling, belongs to eternity just as much, even though no one knows of it or sees it or records it or hands it down to posterity.†   (source)
  • There is no more dangerous gift to posterity than a few cleverly turned platitudes.†   (source)
  • As for Matthew Maule's posterity, it was supposed now to be extinct.†   (source)
  • Or as if he were bound to provide charms for his posterity in his own person!†   (source)
  • "Posterity will do him justice," he concluded, and at once turned to Pierre.†   (source)
  • By it the blessings of liberty are forever withheld from women and their female posterity.†   (source)
  • What dazzles, for the Moment spends its spirit: What's genuine, shall Posterity inherit.†   (source)
  • But be at ease! your name shall descend to posterity!†   (source)
  • If I should choose to preach Posterity, Where would you get contemporary fun?†   (source)
  • Let our remotest posterity recall your achievements this day with pride.†   (source)
  • If this support was wanting, he was sustained by his ancestors and animated by his posterity.†   (source)
  • And as for posterity, damn posterity.'†   (source)
  • In consequence, Stephen Blaine handed down to posterity his height of just under six feet and his tendency to waver at crucial moments, these two abstractions appearing in his son Amory.†   (source)
  • That she had not married, at thirty-three, was due entirely to the preference of modern young men for jazz-dancing hussies; and she was not only a young lady of delicate reservations but also a singer; in fact, she was going to the West Indies to preserve the wonders of primitive art for reverent posterity in the native ballads she would collect and sing to a delighted public—if only she learned how to sing.†   (source)
  • As I went with them the memory of my confident anticipations of a profoundly grave and intellectual posterity came, with irresistible merriment, to my mind.†   (source)
  • Women—of whom he had expected so much; whose beauty he had hoped to transmute into modes of art; whose unfathomable instincts, marvellously incoherent and inarticulate, he had thought to perpetuate in terms of experience—had become merely consecrations to their own posterity.†   (source)
  • I have gone through so much in the last few hours that I feel capable of writing a whole treatise on the conduct of life for the instruction of posterity.†   (source)
  • This American government--what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity?†   (source)
  • The act of 1866 gave the Freedmen's Bureau its final form,—the form by which it will be known to posterity and judged of men.†   (source)
  • …by Lord Coodle's making the timely discovery that if in the heat of debate he had said that he scorned and despised the whole ignoble career of Sir Thomas Doodle, he had merely meant to say that party differences should never induce him to withhold from it the tribute of his warmest admiration; while it as opportunely turned out, on the other hand, that Sir Thomas Doodle had in his own bosom expressly booked Lord Coodle to go down to posterity as the mirror of virtue and honour.†   (source)
  • For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity.†   (source)
  • The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.†   (source)
  • Step by step, withdrawing deferentially and dropping his voice, the yellow Saddhu clomb back to the carriage, cursing the D.S.P. to remotest posterity, by—here Kim almost jumped—by the curse of the Queen's Stone, by the writing under the Queen's Stone, and by an assortment of Gods with wholly, new names.†   (source)
  • Their immediate posterity, the generation next to the early emigrants, wore the blackest shade of Puritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all the subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up.†   (source)
  • Posterity, perhaps, will know.†   (source)
  • Blandois calling to pay his respects, Mr Dorrit received him with affability as the friend of Mr Gowan, and mentioned to him his idea of commissioning Mr Gowan to transmit him to posterity.†   (source)
  • The whole were grouped in a manner that aped the streets of a city, and were evidently so arranged by the directions of one who looked to the wants of posterity rather than to the convenience of the present incumbents.†   (source)
  • Thirteen hundred years hence—so says the unwritten law—the 'combine' will be the other way, and then how these fine people's posterity will fume and fret and grit their teeth over the insolent tyranny of trade unions!†   (source)
  • The aristocratic magistrate is urged at the same time toward the same point by the passions of the community, by his own, and I may almost add by those of his posterity.†   (source)
  • There was a celebrated Fourier at the Academy of Science, whom posterity has forgotten; and in some garret an obscure Fourier, whom the future will recall.†   (source)
  • Then was it not the sacred duty of the men of Coketown, with forefathers before them, an admiring world in company with them, and a posterity to come after them, to hurl out traitors from the tents they had pitched in a sacred and a God-like cause?†   (source)
  • "Not so, by the soul of Hereward!" said the Saxon; "lead I cannot; but may posterity curse me in my grave, if I follow not with the foremost wherever thou shalt point the way—The quarrel is mine, and well it becomes me to be in the van of the battle."†   (source)
  • You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.†   (source)
  • …pocket, being man's, might belong to one man, or one family; but that the creations of the brain, being God's, ought as a matter of course to belong to the people at large—and if I was pleasantly disposed, I should like to make a joke about posterity, and say that those who wrote for posterity should be content to be rewarded by the approbation OF posterity; it might take with the house, and could never do me any harm, because posterity can't be expected to know anything about me or…†   (source)
  • I believe that ambitious men in democracies are less engrossed than any others with the interests and the judgment of posterity; the present moment alone engages and absorbs them.†   (source)
  • Posterity will find a difficulty in understanding this character, which history explains only by facts and never by reason.†   (source)
  • Unless, indeed, a man may be so called, whose fortune is made, whose fame may be said to be established for ever, whose name will go down to posterity with that of Buffon—Buffon! a mere compiler: one who flourishes on the foundation of other men's labours.†   (source)
  • The orator, or the politician, who can produce such a state of things, is commonly popular with his contemporaries, however he may be treated by posterity.†   (source)
  • "Since you have preserved my narration," said he, "I would not that a mutilated one should go down to posterity."†   (source)
  • Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design;—and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients.†   (source)
  • 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.†   (source)
  • It was wonderful to see his face shining at us out of a thin cloud of these delicate fumes, as he stirred, and mixed, and tasted, and looked as if he were making, instead of punch, a fortune for his family down to the latest posterity.†   (source)
  • The favorite of two kings, immensely rich, all-powerful in a kingdom which he disordered at his fancy and calmed again at his caprice, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, had lived one of those fabulous existences which survive, in the course of centuries, to astonish posterity.†   (source)
  • Accordingly, his reign was like the course of a brilliant and rapid meteor, which shoots along the face of Heaven, shedding around an unnecessary and portentous light, which is instantly swallowed up by universal darkness; his feats of chivalry furnishing themes for bards and minstrels, but affording none of those solid benefits to his country on which history loves to pause, and hold up as an example to posterity.†   (source)
  • We must run our streets by the compass, coz, and disregard trees, hills, ponds, stumps, or, in fact, anything but posterity.†   (source)
  • Might not the basket, stable-broom, mat-making, corn-parching, linen-spinning, and pottery business have thrived here, making the wilderness to blossom like the rose, and a numerous posterity have inherited the land of their fathers?†   (source)
  • Yea, more than equally, thought Ahab; since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.†   (source)
  • I do not see why history has not transmitted to posterity the names of these four discreet and venerable damsels.†   (source)
  • And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people - women as well as men.†   (source)
  • [Then, more gently] It may be that posterity, which will despise us for our blind and stupid lives, will find some road to happiness; but we—you and I—have but one hope, the hope that we may be visited by visions, perhaps by pleasant ones, as we lie resting in our graves.†   (source)
  • As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum,[16] so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age.†   (source)
  • References were extensive even here, but not altogether shoreless; and sentences were actually to be written in the shape wherein they would be scanned by Brasenose and a less formidable posterity.†   (source)
  • You are but doing over again, in another shape, what your ancestor before you did, and sending down to your posterity the curse inherited from him!†   (source)
  • It is now reasonable that, before we pass any further, the reasons of his undertaking should be more exactly made known unto posterity, especially unto the posterity of those that were the undertakers, lest they come at length to forget and neglect the true interest of New England.†   (source)
  • But the task would exceed our prerogatives; and, as history, like love, is so apt to surround her heroes with an atmosphere of imaginary brightness, it is probable that Louis de Saint Veran will be viewed by posterity only as the gallant defender of his country, while his cruel apathy on the shores of the Oswego and of the Horican will be forgotten.†   (source)
  • Such are my physical attributes; of my moral properties, let posterity speak; it becomes me to be mute.†   (source)
  • NAPOLEON MOSCOW, OCTOBER 30, 1812 Kutuzov replied: "I should be cursed by posterity were I looked on as the initiator of a settlement of any sort.†   (source)
  • The mind of Judge Temple, at all times comprehensive, had received from his peculiar occupations a bias to look far into futurity, in his speculations on the improvements that posterity were to make in his lands.†   (source)
  • "Would you account the fall of a corner-stone, from the foundations of the edifice of learning, a matter of indifference to contemporaries or to posterity?" interrupted Obed.†   (source)
  • Education has taught them the utility of instruction, and has enabled them to transmit that instruction to their posterity.†   (source)
  • It is too dear bought an inheritance, and too heavy with the curse upon it, to be shifted yet awhile from the Colonel's posterity."†   (source)
  • …the reader, that while in the earlier geological strata there are found the fossils of monsters now almost completely extinct; the subsequent relics discovered in what are called the Tertiary formations seem the connecting, or at any rate intercepted links, between the antichronical creatures, and those whose remote posterity are said to have entered the Ark; all the Fossil Whales hitherto discovered belong to the Tertiary period, which is the last preceding the superficial formations.†   (source)
  • But I am inclined to believe that the number of these thinkers will be less in democratic than in other ages; and that our posterity will tend more and more to a single division into two parts—some relinquishing Christianity entirely, and others returning to the bosom of the Church of Rome.†   (source)
  • In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident.†   (source)
  • MERRY-ANDREW Posterity!†   (source)
  • The preamble of the Federal Constitution says: "We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."†   (source)
  • Constitution Of The United States Of America We The People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America: Article I Section 1.†   (source)
  • But when a Northern State declared that the son of the slave should be born free, the slave lost a large portion of his market value, since his posterity was no longer included in the bargain, and the owner had then a strong interest in transporting him to the South.†   (source)
  • This is a very common course of things, even in the present state of the Union; but it was peculiarly the fortunes of the two extremes of society, in the peaceful and unenterprising colonies of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, The posterity of Marmaduke did not escape the common lot of those who depend rather on their hereditary possessions than on their own powers; and in the third generation they had descended to a point below which, in this happy country, it is barely possible for…†   (source)
  • Nothing; no more than with posterity!†   (source)
  • With his horizon all his own, yet he a poor man, born to be poor, with his inherited Irish poverty or poor life, his Adam's grandmother and boggy ways, not to rise in this world, he nor his posterity, till their wading webbed bog-trotting feet get talaria to their heels.†   (source)
  • And the exile, separated from the beloved France so dear to his heart, died a lingering death on that rock and bequeathed his great deeds to posterity.†   (source)
  • A corrupt or an incapable magistrate will not concert his measures with another magistrate, simply because that individual is as corrupt and as incapable as himself; and these two men will never unite their endeavors to promote the corruption and inaptitude of their remote posterity.†   (source)
  • "But we shall live to see the day, I trust," went on the artist, "when no man shall build his house for posterity.†   (source)
  • Under the most splendid house in the city is still to be found the cellar where they store their roots as of old, and long after the superstructure has disappeared posterity remark its dent in the earth.†   (source)
  • The first and chief object of our Order, the foundation on which it rests and which no human power can destroy, is the preservation and handing on to posterity of a certain important mystery…. which has come down to us from the remotest ages, even from the first man—a mystery on which perhaps the fate of mankind depends.†   (source)
  • She had heard of the anathema flung by Maule, the executed wizard, against Colonel Pyncheon and his posterity,—that God would give them blood to drink,—and likewise of the popular notion, that this miraculous blood might now and then be heard gurgling in their throats.†   (source)
  • They emigrated to Holland, and settled in the city of Leyden in 1610, where they abode, being lovingly respected by the Dutch, for many years: they left it in 1620 for several reasons, the last of which was, that their posterity would in a few generations become Dutch, and so lose their interest in the English nation; they being desirous rather to enlarge His Majesty's dominions, and to live under their natural prince.†   (source)
  • It is natural that these and a countless and infinite quantity of other reasons, the number depending on the endless diversity of points of view, presented themselves to the men of that day; but to us, to posterity who view the thing that happened in all its magnitude and perceive its plain and terrible meaning, these causes seem insufficient.†   (source)
  • Furthermore, the original perpetrator and father of this mischief appears to have perpetuated himself, and still walks the street,—at least, his very image, in mind and body,—with the fairest prospect of transmitting to posterity as rich and as wretched an inheritance as he has received!†   (source)
  • When they heard Napoleon's proclamation offering them, as compensation for mutilation and death, the words of posterity about their having been in the battle before Moscow, they cried "Vive l'Empereur!" just as they had cried "Vive l'Empereur!" at the sight of the portrait of the boy piercing the terrestrial globe with a toy stick, and just as they would have cried "Vive l'Empereur!" at any nonsense that might be told them.†   (source)
  • A man will commit almost any wrong,—he will heap up an immense pile of wickedness, as hard as granite, and which will weigh as heavily upon his soul, to eternal ages,—only to build a great, gloomy, dark-chambered mansion, for himself to die in, and for his posterity to be miserable in.†   (source)
  • Not only did his contemporaries, carried away by their passions, talk in this way, but posterity and history have acclaimed Napoleon as grand, while Kutuzov is described by foreigners as a crafty, dissolute, weak old courtier, and by Russians as something indefinite—a sort of puppet useful only because he had a Russian name.†   (source)
  • It implied that the weaknesses and defects, the bad passions, the mean tendencies, and the moral diseases which lead to crime are handed down from one generation to another, by a far surer process of transmission than human law has been able to establish in respect to the riches and honors which it seeks to entail upon posterity.†   (source)
  • Such being the case, and he, the old bachelor, in possession of the ill-gotten spoil,—with the black stain of blood sunken deep into it, and still to be scented by conscientious nostrils,—the question occurred, whether it were not imperative upon him, even at this late hour, to make restitution to Maule's posterity.†   (source)
  • When it was understood, however, that the Colonel intended to erect a family mansion-spacious, ponderously framed of oaken timber, and calculated to endure for many generations of his posterity over the spot first covered by the log-built hut of Matthew Maule, there was much shaking of the head among the village gossips.†   (source)
  • Hence, too, might be drawn a weighty lesson from the little-regarded truth, that the act of the passing generation is the germ which may and must produce good or evil fruit in a far-distant time; that, together with the seed of the merely temporary crop, which mortals term expediency, they inevitably sow the acorns of a more enduring growth, which may darkly overshadow their posterity.†   (source)
  • …generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief; and he would feel it a singular gratification if this romance might effectually convince mankind—or, indeed, any one man—of the folly of tumbling down an avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate, on the heads of an unfortunate posterity, thereby to maim and crush them, until the accumulated mass shall be scattered abroad in its original atoms.†   (source)
  • But there was a story, for which it is difficult to conceive any foundation, that the posterity of Matthew Maule had some connection with the mystery of the looking-glass, and that, by what appears to have been a sort of mesmeric process, they could make its inner region all alive with the departed Pyncheons; not as they had shown themselves to the world, nor in their better and happier hours, but as doing over again some deed of sin, or in the crisis of life's bitterest sorrow.†   (source)
  • When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember, that virtue is not hereditary.†   (source)
  • It may be well my posterity should be informed that to this little artifice, with the blessing of God, their ancestor ow'd the constant felicity of his life, down to his 79th year, in which this is written.†   (source)
  • We cannot be sure why, out of all these songs, the "Anger of Achilles" was selected to be written down and handed on to posterity; it appears not to aspire to be the song of Troy, for its story is restricted to a few weeks toward the end of that very long war, and not even the final weeks at that.†   (source)
  • …it as sparingly as possible, avoiding occasions of expense by cultivating peace, but remembering also that timely disbursements to prepare for danger frequently prevent much greater disbursements to repel it, avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt, not only by shunning occasions of expense, but by vigorous exertion in time of peace to discharge the debts which unavoidable wars may have occasioned, not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear.†   (source)
  • Secondly, as no man at first could possess any other public honours than were bestowed upon him, so the givers of those honours could have no power to give away the right of posterity.†   (source)
  • We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.†   (source)
  • I mention this industry the more particularly and the more freely, tho' it seems to be talking in my own praise, that those of my posterity, who shall read it, may know the use of that virtue, when they see its effects in my favour throughout this relation.†   (source)
  • Can we but leave posterity with a settled form of government, an independent constitution of its own, the purchase at any price will be cheap.†   (source)
  • Having emerged from the poverty and obscurity in which I was born and bred, to a state of affluence and some degree of reputation in the world, and having gone so far through life with a considerable share of felicity, the conducing means I made use of, which with the blessing of God so well succeeded, my posterity may like to know, as they may find some of them suitable to their own situations, and therefore fit to be imitated.†   (source)
  • If you cannot do all these, then are you only deceiving yourselves, and by your delay bringing ruin upon posterity.†   (source)
  • The least fracture now will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak; the wound will enlarge with the tree, and posterity read it in full grown characters.†   (source)
  • 'tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected, even to the end of time, by the proceedings now.†   (source)
  • Our present union is marked with both these characters: we are young and we have been distressed; but our concord hath withstood our troubles, and fixes a memorable area for posterity to glory in.†   (source)
  • To the evil of monarchy we have added that of hereditary succession; and as the first is a degradation and lessening of ourselves, so the second, claimed as a matter of right, is an insult and an imposition on posterity.†   (source)
  • But to expend millions for the sake of getting a few vile acts repealed, and routing the present ministry only, is unworthy the charge, and is using posterity with the utmost cruelty; because it is leaving them the great work to do, and a debt upon their backs, from which they derive no advantage.†   (source)
  • As parents, we can have no joy, knowing that THIS GOVERNMENT is not sufficiently lasting to ensure any thing which we may bequeath to posterity: And by a plain method of argument, as we are running the next generation into debt, we ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully.†   (source)
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