Ancestor Quotes - Page 20

• Before this generation goes on to its ancestors, we should, we must, do our level best to pass on our lessons, so that they live in our people's minds and lives.

  Mumia Abu-Jamal

  People, Mind, This Generation

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• The lesson that Americans today have forgotten or never learned - the lesson which our ancestors tried so hard to teach - is that the greatest threat to our lives, liberty, property, and security is not some foreign government, as our rulers so often tell us. The greatest threat to our freedom and well-being lies with our own government!.

  Jacob G. Hornberger

  Lying, Government, Liberty

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• When some people look at a shrimp they think, "Hmm. Delicious." When I look at a shrimp I think, "You're a miracle, absolutely incredible. Your ancestors have gone back hundreds of millions of years." And to develop a thing as simple as a shrimp cocktail, you have to calculate the hundreds of millions of years that have preceded that moment where you're sitting there with your sauce and fork poised.

  Sylvia Earle

  Simple, Thinking, Years

  "Big Thinkers on Evolution". "NOVA" Interview, www.pbs.org. October 6, 2009.

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• The idea that humans could be related to ape-like ancestors and the rest of creation was considered subversive. If man was just an animal, then he doesn't live forever, he has no soul. And if men don't have a soul, then there's no afterlife. No heaven, no fiery deterrent of hell to keep people in line in this life. And if there's no fiery deterrent to keep people in line, "well then we might as well have hell on Earth!" the critics said.

  James Moore

  Animal, Men, Ideas

  "Big Thinkers on Evolution". Interview with David Espar and Susan K. Lewis, www.pbs.org. 2001.

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• The ancestor of every action is thought; when we understand that we begin to comprehend that our world is governed by thought and that everything without had its counterpart originally within the mind.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Our World, Mind, Action

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• Childbirth takes place at the intersection of time; in all cultures it links past, present and future. In traditional cultures birth unites the world of 'now' with the world of the ancestors, and is part of the great tree of life extending in time and eternity.

  Sheila Kitzinger

  Past, Tree, Culture

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• I'm just confused as to where we lost that in America because it is everyone's God-given right to think the way they think and that's fine. That's why our ancestors came here to America, to believe what they want, pray how they want and follow a religion with whoever they want.

  Angie Harmon

  Confused, Believe, Thinking

  "Part Two: Angie Harmon Defends Bristol Palin's Pregnancy, Says GOP Is More Understanding" By Hollie McKay, www.foxnews.com. April 1, 2009.

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• It is only when all our Christian ancestors are allowed to become our contemporaries that the real splendor of the Christian faith and the Christian life begins to dawn upon us.

  Bill Vaughan

  Christian, Real, Dawn

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• I have no urns, no dusty monuments;
  No broken images of ancestors,
  Wanting an ear, or nose; no forged tales
  Of long descents, to boast false honors from.

  Ben Jonson

  Long, Broken, Honor

  Ben Jonson, Felix Emmanuel Schelling (1966). “The Complete Plays: The alchemist. Catline, his conspiracy. Bartholomew Fair. The devil is an ass. The staple of news. The new inn; or, The light heart. The magnetic lady; or, Humours reconciled. A tale of a tub. The sad shepard; or, A tale of Robin Hood. The case is altered. Glossary”

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• The glory of ancestors sheds a light around posterity; it allows neither good nor bad qualities to remain in obscurity.
  [Lat., Majorum gloria posteris lumen est, neque bona neque mala in occulto patitur.]

  Sallust

  Light, Quality, Bad Qualities

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• Civilized life has altogether grown too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must provide a harmless outlets for the impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in hunting.

  Bertrand Russell

  Hunting, Outlets, Impulse

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell”, p.452, Routledge

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• I have often felt as though I had inherited all the defiance and all the passions with which our ancestors defended their Temple and could gladly sacrifice my life for one great moment in history. And at the same time I always felt so helpless and incapable of expressing these ardent passions even by a word or a poem.

  Sigmund Freud

  Passion, Sacrifice, Temples

  Sigmund Freud, Ernst L. Freud (1960). “Letters of Sigmund Freud”, p.202, Courier Corporation

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• one of Mr. [Thomas] Hardy's ancestors must have married a weeping willow. There are pages and pages in his collected poems which are simply plain narratives in ballad form of how an unenjoyable time was had by all.

  Rebecca West

  Weeping Willows, Narrative, Pages

  Rebecca West (2010). “The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews”, p.118, Open Road Media

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• Art is viable when it finds elements in the surrounding environment. Our ancestors drew their subject matter from the religious attitudes which weighed on their souls. We must now learn to draw inspiration from the tangible miracles around us.

  Umberto Boccioni

  Religious, Art, Attitude

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• Has a philosopher like you failed to discover that our country is more to be valued and higher and holier far than mother or father or any ancestor, and more to be regarded in the eyes of the gods and of men of understanding?

  Socrates

  Mother, Country, Father

  "Crito". By Plato,

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• It is as though the ancestors who made language and knew from what bestiality its use rescued them are saying to us: Beware of interfering with its purpose! For when language is seriously interfered with, when it is disjoined from truth, be it from mere incompetence or worse, from malice, horrors can descend again on mankind.

  Chinua Achebe

  Purpose, Use, Language

  FaceBook post by Chinua Achebe from Jul 15, 2015

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• A man's life from birth to death was a series of transition rites which brought him nearer and nearer to his ancestors.

  Chinua Achebe

  Life, Men, Transition

  Chinua Achebe (2009). “Things Fall Apart: Authoritative Text, Contexts and Criticism”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

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• No one alive today has a single ancestor in his or her past who died in infancy. We are the champions, my friend!

  Daniel Levitin

  Past, Winning, Champion

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• Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors.

  Norman Doidge

  Fear, Ghost, Psychoanalysis

  Norman Doidge (2007). “The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science”, p.243, Penguin

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• I have two Filipino nannies who have British passport and not me. I don't need British passport. When you were running around in an animal skin, my ancestors were building the pyramids.

  Mohamed Al-Fayed

  Running, Animal, Two

  "Pharaoh's revenge" by Stephen Armstrong, www.theguardian.com. April 14, 2006.

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• The core of ethics runs deep in our species and is common to human beings everywhere. It survives the most appalling hardships and the most ruthless attempts to deprive human beings of their humanity. Nevertheless, some people resist the idea that his core has a biological basis which we have inherited from our pre-human ancestors.

  Peter Singer

  Running, Ideas, People

  Peter Singer (2011). “The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress”, p.27, Princeton University Press

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• It is now generally accepted that the roots of our ethics lie in patterns of behavior that evolved among our pre-human ancestors, the social mammals and that we retain within our biological nature elements of these evolved responses. We have learned considerably more about this responses, and we are beginning to to understand how they interact with our capacity to reason.

  Peter Singer

  Lying, Roots, Mammals

  Peter Singer (2011). “The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress”, p.11, Princeton University Press

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• X is not my real name. But if you study history, you'll find why no Black man in the Western Hemisphere knows his real name. Some of his ancestors kidnapped our ancestors from Africa and took us into the Western Hemisphere and sold us there, and our names were stripped from us and so today we don't know who we really are. I am one of those who admit it, and so I just put X up there to keep from wearing his name.

  Malcolm X

  Real, Men, Names

  Malcolm X's speech at the Oxford Union debate (December 3, 1964) as quoted in Saladin Ambar "Malcolm X at Oxford Union: Racial Politics in a Global Era" (p. 36), 2013.

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• The American Dream can no more remain static than can the American nation.... We cannot any longer take an old approach to world problems. They aren't the same problems. It isn't the same world. We must not adopt the methods of our ancestors; instead, we must emulate that pioneer quality in our ancestors that made them attempt new methods for a New World.

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  Dream, America, Quality

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• And all knowledge, when separated from justice and virtue, is seen to be cunning and not wisdom; wherefore make this your first and last and constant and all-absorbing aim, to exceed, if possible, not only us but all your ancestors in virtue; and know that to excel you in virtue only brings us shame, but that to be excelled by you is a source of happiness to us.

  Plato

  Plato, Justice, Lasts

  Plato (2015). “The Complete Plato”, p.166, Booklassic

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