Ancestor Quotes - Page 13

• Your rat tail is all the fashion now. I prefer a bushy plume, carried straight up. You are Siamese and your ancestors lived in trees. Mine lived in palaces. It has been suggested to me that I am a bit of a snob. How true! I prefer to be.

  Raymond Chandler

  Fashion, Cat, Tree

  Raymond Chandler (1987). “Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler”, Delta

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• There is an ancient Indian saying: "We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children." If we use this ethic as a moral compass, then our rendezvous with reality can also become a rendezvous with opportunity.

  Patricia Schroeder

  Children, Opportunity, Reality

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• In the course of individual development, inherited characters appear, in general, earlier than adaptive ones, and the earlier a certain character appears in ontogeny, the further back must lie in time when it was acquired by its ancestors.

  Ernst Haeckel

  Lying, Character, Development

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• The Gothic idea that we were to look backwards instead of forwards for the improvement of the human mind, and to recur to the annals of our ancestors for what is most perfect in government, in religion and in learning, is worthy of those bigots in religion and government by whom it has been recommended, and whose purposes it would answer. But it is not an idea which this country will endure.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Country, Ideas, Government

  Thomas Jefferson (1854). “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson”, p.318

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• We were told that they wished merely to pass through our country. . . to seek for gold in the far west . . . Yet before the ashes of the council are cold, the Great Father is building his forts among us. . . . His presence here is . . . an insult to the spirits of our ancestors. Are we then to give up their sacred graves to be allowed for corn?

  Red Cloud

  Country, Giving Up, Father

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• If you are proud of your descent from virtuous ancestors, how empty their virtue will leave your hands if you yourself are not virtuous. How little pride your ancestors will have in you in this world and the next if you do no good! All men are children of Adam whom Allah created by His own Hands, giving him paradise for a dwelling place and letting His angels bow down before him. But how little is the advantage from this since all the vices dwell in mankind and all the wicked impious people are among their number.

  Ibn Hazm

  Wisdom, Children, Islamic

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• Man's unconscious... contains all the patterns of life and behaviour inherited from his ancestors, so that every human child, prior to consciousness, is possessed of a potential system of adapted psychic functioning.

  Carl Jung

  Children, Men, Psychics

  Carl Gustav Jung (2001). “Modern Man in Search of a Soul”, p.190, Psychology Press

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• Since Serengeti-scale savanna scenes are only one or two million years old, our earliest after-the-apes ancestors didn't move into this scene so much as they evolved with it, as the slower climate changes and uplift produced more grass and less forest.

  William H. Calvin

  Uplifting, Moving, Two

  William H. Calvin (2010). “A Brain for All Seasons: Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate Change”, p.90, William H. Calvin

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• The longest tyranny that ever sway'd
  Was that wherein our ancestors betray'd
  Their free-born reason to the Stagirite [Aristotle],
  And made his torch their universal light.
  So truth, while only one suppli'd the state,
  Grew scarce, and dear, and yet sophisticate.

  John Dryden

  Truth, Light, Torches

  John Dryden, John Sargeaunt (1929). “The Poems of John Dryden, Ed., with an Introduction and Textual Notes”

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• Coal, oil and gas are called fossil fuels, because they are mostly made of the fossil remains of beings from long ago. The chemical energy within them is a kind of stored sunlight originally accumulated by ancient plants. Our civilization runs by burning the remains of humble creatures who inhabited the Earth hundreds of millions of years before the first humans came on the scene. Like some ghastly cannibal cult, we subsist on the dead bodies of our ancestors and distant relatives. - Dr. Carl Sagan

  Carl Sagan

  Running, Humble, Long Ago

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium”, p.104, Ballantine Books

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• In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our ... nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists, and quacks. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive skepticism of adult science.

  Richard Dawkins

  Skulls, Childhood, Parent

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• The theory of natural selection is the centerpiece of The Origin of Species and of evolutionary theory. It is this theory that accounts for the adaptations of organisms, those innumerable features that so wonderfully equip them for survival and reproduction; it is this theory that accounts for the divergence of species from common ancestors and thus for the endless diversity of life. Natural selection is a simple concept, but it is perhaps the most important idea in biology.

  Douglas J. Futuyma

  Simple, Ideas, Diversity

  Douglas J. Futuyma (2009). “Evolution”, Sinauer Associates Incorporated

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• We want to govern with our indigenous ancestors' models: That means a different concept of participation, community work and honesty.

  Evo Morales

  Honesty, Mean, Community

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• By nature's law, every man has a right to seize and retake by force his own property taken from him by another, by force of fraud. Nor is this natural right among the first which is taken into the hands of regular government after it is instituted. It was long retained by our ancestors. It was a part of their common law, laid down in their books, recognized by all the authorities, and regulated as to circumstances of practice.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Book, Taken, Men

  Thomas Jefferson (1884). “The Works of Thomas Jefferson: Published by Order of Congress from the Original Manuscripts Deposited in the Department of State”

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• It is not the organs-that is, the character and form of the animal's bodily parts-that have given rise to its habits and particular structures. It is the habits and manner of life and the conditions in which its ancestors lived that have in the course of time fashioned its bodily form, its organs and qualities.

  Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

  Character, Animal, Quality

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• The most-honored ancestors of your matriarch besmirched the season of the orange blossom.

  Nick Bakay

  Sports, Hockey, Orange

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• We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes. Our common ancestor with the chimpanzees and gorillas is much more recent than their common ancestor with the Asian apes - the gibbons and orangutans. There is no natural category that includes chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans but excludes humans.

  Richard Dawkins

  Apes, Asian, Orangutans

  A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 2003, p. 22,

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• StarClan may go where they please, they have betrayed SkyClan. From this day on, I will have nothing more to do with our warrior ancestors. StarClan allowed the Twolegs to destroy our home. They look down on us now, and let the moon go on shining while you drive us out. They said there would always be five Clans in the forest, but they lied. SkyClan will never look to the stars again.

  Erin Hunter

  Stars, Home, Warrior

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• The glory of each generation is to make its own precedents.

  Belva Ann Lockwood

  Generations, Glory, Precedent

  Speech to National Convention of Woman Suffrage Association,Washington, D.C., 16 - 17 Jan. 1877

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• Going where no man has gone before is more difficult than it sounds. Our cousins and ancestors were no less curious than we are, and were perhaps bolder. This world is their tomb. You should look under the bed.

  N.D. Wilson

  Cousin, Men, Bed

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• Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created.

  Walter Lippmann

  Records, Machines, Tradition

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• We've uncovered some embarrassing ancestors in the not-too-distant past. Some horse thieves, and some people killed on Saturday nights. One of my relatives, unfortunately, was even in the newspaper business.

  Jimmy Carter

  Horse, Past, Night

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• Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.

  Daniel Levitin

  Music, Communication, Speech

  Daniel J. Levitin (2011). “This Is Your Brain On Music: Understanding a Human Obsession”, p.260, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished.

  Carl Jung

  Karma, Children, Fate

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• In many ways, constancy is an illusion. After all, our ancestors were immigrants, many of them moving on every few years; today we are migrants in time. Unless teachers can hold up a model of lifelong learning and adaptation, graduates are likely to find themselves trapped into obsolescence as the world changes around them. Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain.

  Mary Catherine Bateson

  Life, Teacher, Moving

  Mary Catherine Bateson (2001). “Composing a Life”, p.14, Grove Press

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