Heredity Quotes - Page 3

• I realize that it is as one ages and loses one's natural force that one is at the mercy of heredity. The young are themselves: the aging, their parents' children.

  Sylvia Townsend Warner

  Children, Parent, Age

  Sylvia Townsend Warner, Claire Harman (1994). “The diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner”, Virago Pr

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• Whereas, to borrow an illustration from mathematics, life was formerly an equation of, say, 100 unknown quantities, it is now one of 99 only, inasmuch as memory and heredity have been shown to be one and the same thing.

  Samuel Butler

  Life, Memories, Science

  Samuel Butler (1926). “The Shrewsbury Edition of the Works of Samuel Butler: The notebooks of Samuel Butler”

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• Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the a.non.y.muse roller that passed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Art, Unique, Design

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• Recently, results of the Human Genome Project have shattered one of Science's fundamental core beliefs, the concept of genetic determinism. We have been led to believe that our genes determine the character of our lives, yet new research surprisingly reveals that it is the character of our lives that controls our genes. Rather than being victims of our heredity, we are actually masters of our genome.

  Bruce H. Lipton

  Believe, Character, Research

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• I shall borrow two words used for a slightly different purpose by the great demographer Alfred Lotka to distinguish between the two systems of heredity enjoyed by man: endosomatic or internal heredity for the ordinary or genetical heredity we have in common with animals; and exosomatic or external heredity for the non-genetic heredity that is peculiarly our own - the heredity that is mediated through tradition, by which I mean the transfer of information through non-genetic channels from one generation to the next.

  Peter Medawar

  Mean, Animal, Men

  Peter Brian Medawar (1991). “The Threat and the Glory: Reflections on Science and Scientists”, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Heredity: the traits that a disobedient child gets from the other parent.

  Luther Burbank

  Children, Parent, Traits

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• The historic idea that the devil tempts men had this remarkable effect, it produced the man of iron who fought; the modern idea of blaming his heredity or his circumstances produces the man who gives in at once.

  Oswald Chambers

  Men, Ideas, Iron

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• I established the opposite view, that this history of the embryo (ontogeny) must be completed by a second, equally valuable, and closely connected branch of thought - the history of race (phylogeny). Both of these branches of evolutionary science, are, in my opinion, in the closest causal connection; this arises from the reciprocal action of the laws of heredity and adaptation... 'ontogenesis is a brief and rapid recapitulation of phylogenesis, determined by the physiological functions of heredity (generation) and adaptation (maintenance).

  Ernst Haeckel

  Views, Law, Opposites

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• We adore titles and heredities in our hearts and ridicule them with our mouths. This is our democratic privilege.

  Mark Twain

  Freedom, Heart, Democracy

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.77, Courier Corporation

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• Although random mutations influenced the course of evolution, their influence was mainly by loss, alteration, and refinement... Never, however, did that one mutation make a wing, a fruit, a woody stem, or a claw appear. Mutations, in summary, tend to induce sickness, death, or deficiencies. No evidence in the vast literature of heredity changes shows unambiguous evidence that random mutation itself, even with geographical isolation of populations, leads to speciation.

  Lynn Margulis

  Loss, Wings, Population

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• Cell genetics led us to investigate cell mechanics. Cell mechanics now compels us to infer the structures underlying it. In seeking the mechanism of heredity and variation we are thus discovering the molecular basis of growth and reproduction. The theory of the cell revealed the unity of living processes; the study of the cell is beginning to reveal their physical foundations.

  C. D. Darlington

  Cells, Growth, Unity

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• We are now witnessing, after the slow fermentation of fifty years, a concentration of technical power aimed at the essential determinants of heredity, development and disease. This concentration is made possible by the common function of nucleic acids as the molecular midwife of all reproductive particles. Indeed it is the nucleic acids which, in spite of their chemical obscurity, are giving to biology a unity which has so far been lacking, a chemical unity.

  C. D. Darlington

  Years, Giving, Unity

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• It is one of the many merits of this admirable biography of Proust's mother that it invites one to return to the novel with perhaps a fuller understanding of Proust's heredity, hinterland, and upbringing. . . . This fascinating book is full of interesting social and cultural observation, of information about French Jewish life, the position of Jews in society and, of course, the Dreyfus case. But it is essentially a study of one of the most remarkable and fruitful of mother-son relationships. As such it is a book that every Proustian will want to read.

  Allan Massie

  Mother, Book, Son

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• We Americans worship the almighty dollar! Well, it is a worthier god than Heredity Privilege.

  Mark Twain

  Dollars, Privilege, Worship

  Mark Twain, Michael Barry Frank, Robert Pack Browning, Lin Salamo, Frederick Anderson, Mark Twain (1980). “Mark Twain's Notebooks & Journals, Volume III: (1883-1891)”, p.520, Univ of California Press

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• Help! I'm being held prisoner by my heredity and environment.

  Dennis Allen

  Heredity And Environment, Helping, Prisoner

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• To defy heredity is to defy billions of years, to defy the first cell

  Emile M. Cioran

  Cells, Years, Firsts

  Emile M. Cioran (1976). “The Trouble with Being Born”, Viking Books

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• ...one doubts existence of free will [because] every action determined by heredity, constitution, example of others or teaching of others." "This view should teach one profound humility, one deserves no credit for anything...nor ought one to blame others.

  Charles Darwin

  Teaching, Humility, Views

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• Thanks to our cinctures and corsets we have succeeded in making an artificial being out of woman. She is an anomaly, and Nature herself, obedient to the laws of heredity, aids us in complicating and enervating her. We carefully keep her in a state of nervous weakness and muscular inferiority, and in guarding her from fatigue, we take away from her possibilities of development. Thus modeled on a bizarre ideal of slenderness to which, strangely enough, we continue to adhere, our women have nothing in common with us, and this, perhaps, may not be without grave moral and social disadvantages.

  Paul Gauguin

  Law, Weakness, Anomalies

  Paul Gauguin (1987). “Gauguin: a retrospective”, Hugh Lauter Levin Associates

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• Increasingly, our leaders must deal with dangers that threaten the entire world, where an understanding of those dangers and the possible solutions depends on a good grasp of science. The ozone layer, the greenhouse effect, acid rain, questions of diet and heredity. All require scientific literacy. Can Americans choose the proper leaders and support the proper programs if they themselves are scientifically illiterate? The whole premise of democracy is that it is safe to leave important questions to the court of public opinion - but is it safe to leave them to the court of public ignorance?

  Isaac Asimov

  Rain, Ignorance, Science

  "Combatting U.S. Scientific Illiteracy" by Isaac Asimov, articles.latimes.com. March 31, 1989.

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• When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock. To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not as a hypothesis that might be incorrect but as a thought it is immoral to think.

  Steven Pinker

  Children, War, Thinking

  Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.14, Penguin

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• Your place in life is not fixed by heredity.

  Wallace D. Wattles

  Greatness, Life Is, Fixed

  Wallace D. Wattles (2013). “The Selected Teachings of Wallace D. Wattles”, p.144, Simon and Schuster

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• Three sorts of goods, Aristotle specified, contribute to happiness: goods of the soul, including moral and intellectual virtues and education; bodily goods, such as strength, good health, beauty, and sound senses; and external goods, such as wealth, friends, good birth, good children, good heredity, good reputation and the like.

  Sissela Bok

  Happiness, Children, Soul

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• Individuals and societies are not helpless victims of heredity. We have the power to change - not by looking "down" to nature but "up" to God, who consistently calls us forward to become the people we were designed to be. A confused world urgently needs a model of what that looks like. If Christians fail to provide that model, who will?

  Philip Yancey

  Christian, Confused, People

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• Consciousness creates the body. Our bodies are made up of dynamic energy systems that are affected by our diets, relationships, heredity, and culture and the interplay of all these factors and activities... We cannot hope to reclaim our bodily wisdom and inherent ability to create health without first understanding the influence of our society on how we think about and care for our bodies.

  Christiane Northrup

  Thinking, Understanding, Energy

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• Musical expression is never primarily national, but is personal and individual rather. It is so deep, so profound, that it goes beyond and below nationality and gives voice to the most private feeling. In music there is never exact heredity. Each man is an individual.

  Ignacy Jan Paderewski

  Men, Expression, Voice

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