We, today, stand on the shoulders of our predecessors who have gone before us. We, as their successors, must catch the torch of freedom and liberty passed on to us by our ancestors. We cannot lose in this battle.
— Benjamin E. Mays
Pioneering Predecessor quotations
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.
Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
Our predecessors understood that the ties that bind America are far stronger than disagreements over any particular policy and far more durable and profound than any party affiliation.
The ability to forget the past enables people to free themselves gradually from the pain they once suffered; but it also often makes them repeat the mistakes of their predecessors.
Each generation wants new symbols, new people, new names.
They want to divorce themselves from their predecessors.
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.
I shall tread in the footsteps of my illustrious predecessor.
Baseball's time is seamless and invisible, a bubble within which players move at exactly the same pace and rhythms as all their predecessors. This is the way the game was played in our youth and in our fathers' youth, and even back then ... there must have been the same feeling that time could be stopped.
I don't think JetBlue has a better chance of being profitable than 100 other predecessors with new airplanes, new employees, low fares, all touchy-feely ... all of them are losers. Most of these guys are smoking ragweed.
Don't bother just to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself.
Today I stand before the world organization which has succeeded to the mantle discarded by its discredited predecessor.
Don't speak ill of your predecessors or successors. You didn't walk in their shoes.
President Obama, don't you think you should follow in the footsteps of your predecessor? Remember, President George W. Bush? He stayed out of the political arena, and he let you, his successor, do your job.
However much one generation learns from another, it can never learn from its predecessor the genuinely human factor. In this respect every generation begins afresh. Thus no generation has learned from another how to love, no generation can begin other than at the beginning.
It is folly to believe that Congress and the president, on their own, will make the necessary and difficult decisions to address the impending financial debacle. After all, they and their predecessors engineered the approaching tsunami. As the situation becomes direr, the federal government's actions will grow more oppressive.
Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
As for the United States' future in Afghanistan, it will be fire and hell and total defeat, God willing, as it was for their predecessors - the Soviets and, before them, the British.
I've never been a fan of presidents who place blame on their predecessors or who accept credit for events that couldn't have been engineered so soon in their tenure.
I tread in the footsteps of illustrious men.
.. in receiving from the people the sacred trust confided to my illustrious predecessor.
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do...Try to be better than yourself.
it is easy to surpass a predecessor, but difficult to avoid being surpassed by a successor.
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
We can try to gain some of the sensibility of some of the indigenous populations of the world or our predecessors 800 years ago. We can laugh at them as being naive and unsophisticated, but unless we can gain that sensibility that there has to be rights of nature as Bolivians and others put it, then we're going to be destroyed.
When the memory of one's predecessors is buried, the assumption persists that there were none and each generation of women believes itself to be faced with the burden of doing everything for the first time. And if no one ever did it beforewhy do we think we can succeed now?
Left-wing zealots have often been prepared to ride roughshod over due process and basic considerations of fairness when they think they can get away with it. For them the ends always seems to justify the means. That is precisely how their predecessors came to create the gulag.
We must not be content to memorize the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors. Let us go out and study beautiful nature.
Among the various supplications with which we successfully appeal to the Virgin Mother of God, the Holy Rosary without doubt occupies a special and distinct place. This prayer, which some call the Psalter of the Virgin or Breviary of the Gospel and of Christian life, was described and recommended by Our Predecessor of happy memory, Leo XIII
To equal a predecessor, one must have twice they worth.
Our predecessors overcame many troubles and much suffering, but each time got back up stronger than before.
You don't like a particular policy or a particular president? Then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election. Push to change it. But don't break it. Don't break what our predecessors spent over two centuries building. That's not being faithful to what this country's about.
Young Americans today are no more learned or skilful than their predecessors, no more knowledgeable, fluent, up-to-date, or inquisitive, except in the materials of youth culture.
In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters.
Human development is a form of chronological unfairness, since late-comers are able to profit by the labors of their predecessors without paying the same price.
Through the years you, the Delaware State family and your predecessors, have faced many challenges. You worked through them with fierce determination and good will, and you have made great progress.
We will make a great and awful mistake if we fail to settle Hebron, neighbor and predecessor of Jerusalem, with a large Jewish settlement, constantly growing and expanding, very soon. This will also be a blessing to the Arab neighbors. Hebron is worthy to be Jerusalem's sister.