“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”
John Stuart Mill
“Why should I care about posterity? What's posterity ever done for me?”
Groucho Marx
“I hope that posterity will judge me kindly, not only as to the things which I have explained, but also to those which I have intentionally omitted so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovery.”
Rene Descartes
“[I]f we and our posterity reject religious instruction and authority, violate the rules of eternal justice, trifle with the injunctions of morality, and recklessly destroy the political constitution which holds us together, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us, that shall bury all our glory in profound obscurity.”
Daniel Webster
“When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary”
Thomas Paine
“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”
Isaac Disraeli
“Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.”
James Joyce
