Ancestor Quotes - Page 21

• Most of us do more than subsist. From the vantage point of our ancestors, we live lives of almost unimaginable ease. Here again, we have innovation to thank.

  Gary Hamel

  Live Life, Innovation, Ease

  Gary Hamel (2012). “What Matters Now: How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation”, p.54, John Wiley & Sons

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• Our ancestors used to play with snakes, we play with mouse.

  Narendra Modi

  Powerful, Play, Snakes

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• Not voting is one of the worst things that could happen in our community. You can vote for whoever you want to, but choosing not to vote spits in the face of our ancestors who fought for our right to vote.

  Otis Moss III

  Community, Voting, Want

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• One of the great things about African-Americans is that we've always had this attitude: We make do with what we got. It comes from our ancestors being slaves.

  Spike Lee

  Attitude, African American, Slave

  "So What's On Your Mind, Spike Lee?". Interview with Stacey Wilson Hunt, www.hollywoodreporter.com. January 17, 2012.

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• The reappearance of the crescent moon after the new moon; the return of the Sun after a total eclipse, the rising of the Sun in the morning after its troublesome absence at night were noted by people around the world; these phenomena spoke to our ancestors of the possibility of surviving death. Up there in the skies was also a metaphor of immortality.

  Carl Sagan

  Morning, Sunset, Moon

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• Like Adam, our first conspicuous ancestor, I must begin, and lay the blame upon a woman; I am glad to recognize that I differ from the father of my sex in no important particular, being as manlike as most of his sons.

  Owen Wister

  Sex, Father, Book

  Owen Wister (2016). “OWEN WISTER Ultimate Collection: Historical Novels, Western Classics, Adventure & Romance Stories (Including Non-Fiction Historical Works): The Virginian, The Promised Land, A Kinsman of Red Cloud, Lady Baltimore, Lin McLean, Red Man and White, The Dragon of Wantley, Padre Ignacio, Philosophy 4, The Jimmyjohn Boss…”, p.638, e-artnow

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• ...yesterday and today and tomorrow are not an arrow that shoots from past to present to future; rather all tenses, and sleeping and waking, mix and cohabit in an atemporal duration beyond clocks and calendars. The Aboriginal world began long ago when the Ancestors sang in Dreamtime the cosmic rhythms that give shape to the things we see, and it is the beginning right now, when a living Tiwi sings the Dream songs that continue, or are, the world.

  Huston Smith

  Dream, Song, Sleep

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• Behind everything in London is something else, and, behind that, is something else still; and so on through the centuries, so that London as we see her is only the latest manifestation of other Londons, and to lover her is to plunge into ancestor-worship.

  Henry Vollam Morton

  London, Lovers, Worship

  Henry Vollam Morton (1951). “In Search of London”

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• Most of what we know about human evolution comes from these: the fossilized bones of our ancestors. With their help, we've traced our evolution from small furry creatures to the big-brained beings we've become today. But bones can't tell us everything.

  Ziya Tong

  Today, Helping, Evolution

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Across the continent, on the shores of small tributaries, in the shadows of sacred mountains, on the vast expanse of the prairies, or in the safety of the woods, prayers are being repeated, as they have for thousands of years, and common people with uncommon courage and the whispers of their ancestors in their ears continue their struggles to protect the land and water and trees on which their very existence is based. And like small tributaries joining together to form a mighty river, their force and power grows.

  Winona LaDuke

  Prayer, Struggle, Years

  Winona LaDuke (2002). “The Winona LaDuke Reader: A Collection of Essential Writings”, p.64, Voyageur Press (MN)

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• We are the ancestors of those gardening the universe.

  Vanna Bonta

  Gardening, Universe

  "Space: what love’s got to do with it" by Vanna Bonta, www.thespacereview.com. October 25, 2004.

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• Is it not possible that the chimpanzees are responding to some feeling like awe? A feeling generated by the mystery of water; water that seems alive, always rushing past yet never going, always the same yet ever different. Was it perhaps similar feelings of awe that gave rise to the first animistic religions, the worship of the elements and the mysteries of nature over which there was no control? Only when our prehistoric ancestors developed language would it have been possible to discuss such internal feelings and create a shared religion.

  Jane Goodall

  Past, Rushing, Water

  "Reason for Hope: a Spiritual Journey". Book by Jane Goodall, Phillip L. Berman, 2000.

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• the breed is more than the pasture. As you know, the cuckoo lays her eggs in any bird's nest; it may be hatched among blackbirds or robins or thrushes, but it is always a cuckoo. ... a man cannot deliver himself from his ancestors.

  Amelia Barr

  Men, Past, Eggs

  Amelia E. Barr (2009). “The Belle of Bowling Green”, p.50, Wildside Press LLC

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• How shall a man escape from his ancestors, or draw off from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father's or mother's life?

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Mother, Father, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1872). “Representative men. English traits. Conduct of life”, p.320

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• We have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realms for a long time. But we don't live in either place the way our parents or ancestors did. Enchantment alters with age, and with the age. We know a dozen Arthurs now, all of them true. The Shire changed irrevocably even in Bilbo's lifetime. Don Quixote went riding out to Argentina and met Jorge Luis Borges there. Plus c'est la même chose, plus ça change.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Long, Parent, Age

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• Our ancestors ... possessed a right, which nature has given to all men, of departing from the country in which chance, not choice has placed them.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Country, Men, Choices

  Thomas Jefferson (1829). “Memoirs, 1: Correspondence and Private Papers”, p.107

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• What grape to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?

  Cyril Connolly

  Wine, Sun, Taught

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• If we could know as intimately as we know our more immediate parents the long line of ancestors through whom the family spirit has passed on its way to us, we should probably become fatalists in face of the apparently overwhelming evidence that there is nothing in us that has not come to us from, or at least through, the Family. Family portrait galleries are a striking confirmation of the persistence of characteristics which ultimately govern the fortunes of successive generations.

  Helen Bosanquet

  Persistence, Long, Parent

  Helen Bosanquet, Bernard Bosanquet (1996). “Helen and Bernard Bosanquet: Works on economics & social welfare: the philosophy of the state and the practice of welfare”

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• Tradition is not something a man can learn; not a thread he picks up when he feels like it; any more than a man can choose his own ancestors. Someone lacking a tradition who would like to have one is like a man unhappily in love.

  Talal Asad

  Men, Tradition, Thread

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• Life is a continuous flux. Our nonhuman ancestors bred, generation after generation, and incrementally begat what we now deem to be the species homo sapiens - ourselves. There is nothing about our ancestral line or about our current biology that dictates how we will evolve in the future. Nothing in the natural order demands that our descendants resemble us in any particular way. Very likely, they will not resemble us. We will almost certainly transform ourselves, likely beyond recognition, in the generations to come.

  Sam Harris

  Life, Order, Demand

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• I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could... That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend.

  Abigail Adams

  Sex, Husband, Giving Up

  "Familiar Letters of John Adams and his wife Abigail Adams" edited by Charles Francis Adams, (p. 147), 1875.

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• Every family had its own peculiar cult, to which no stranger was ever admitted, and which alone could appease and satisfy the gods of that family. The cult was handed down from father to son, from generation to generation, and could not be lost without condemning the whole series of ancestors to eternal misery.

  Helen Bosanquet

  Father, Son, Peculiar

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• Ten years have now passed since many of us first felt the jolt of history-when the second plane crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. We knew from that moment that things can go terribly wrong in our world-not because life is unfair, or moral progress impossible, but because we have failed, generation after generation, to abolish the delusions of our ignorant ancestors.

  Sam Harris

  Years, Our World, Ignorant

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• Without wishing to damp the ardor of curiosity or influence the freedom of inquiry, I will hazard a prediction that, after the most industrious and impartial researchers, the longest liver of you all will find no principles, institutions or systems of education more fit in general to be transmitted to your posterity than those you have received from your ancestors.

  John Adams

  Voting, Curiosity, Wish

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• All to whom want is terrible, upon whatever principle, ought to think themselves obliged to learn the sage maxims of our parsimonious ancestors, and attain the salutary arts of contracting expense; for without economy none can be rich, and with it few can be poor.

  Samuel Johnson

  Art, Thinking, Principles

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy (1857). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: With an Essay on His Life and Genius”, p.97

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