Leibniz dedicated his life to efforts to educate people to understand that true happiness is found by locating their identity in benefitting mankind and their posterity.

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.

Posterity: you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.

The success or failure of a life as far as posterity goes seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of escape.