Ancestor Quotes - Page 28

• What we've inherited from our ancestors has never existed to this extent before. And if we fail to preserve it, it will never, ever exist again. So we cannot fail.

  Donald Trump

  Failing

  Source: www.cnn.com

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• We still are America though. We're still a country that is a country of social mobility. We're still a country of immigrants. We're still a country with common ancestors. And reviving the civics of America and the idea that we're going to be united, at least not right now, but in some common future, and talking in that hopeful way that Martin Luther King did, that Abraham Lincoln did, seems to me that's the way.

  David Brooks

  Country, Hopeful, Common

  Source: www.nbcnews.com

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• We are creatures. We have a link with a native habitat just like every other species. Throughout most of human history, physical activity was unavoidable, calories were scarce and hard to get. In the modern era, calories are unavoidable, physical activity is scare and hard to get. The traits that allowed our ancestors to survive, and let's face it, the survival of our ancestors is the reason that we're here because the people who don't survive and make very crummy ancestors, are our traits. But they're very much at odds with the modern environment.

  David Katz

  People, Survival, Scare

  Source: bigthink.com

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• Hijras earn a living by egging, sex work, badhai or blessing. There are now transgenders in social work, the fashion industry, who have PhDs. I say, "Study, study, study." You need not wear a sari, and even our ancestors said you need not wear feminine attire to be part of the third gender. When I started bar dancing, nobody else was doing it. When I joined the social sector in 1999, there were no nonprofit organizations working for the rights of hijras in India. But I had to do it, I wanted my dignity.

  Laxmi Narayan Tripathi

  Fashion, Blessing, Dancing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Healthy areas that are richest in information are those areas in the wild where we can get all the information that's available to us within our human hearing range. The most valuable information throughout human evolution has been faint sounds. We tend to think in our modern world that if it's loud, if it grabs our attention, it's important. We get a lot of that in advertising. But in nature, it's the faintest sound that's important; it has determined, in the past of our ancestors, perhaps, if they will live or die. Faint sounds are the earliest clues of newly arriving information.

  Gordon Hempton

  Thinking, Past, Healthy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I'm a big believer in the collective unconscious. The idea that there is a deep connection between all of us that goes back to our ancestors and forward to the people who will come after us. It's essentially the job of the artist to anchor that nebulous space, and I think that's what a writer does: goes to that strange place and brings back these little trinkets. The unspoken experience percolated throughout the generations allows you to have knowledge of things you wouldn't know first hand.

  Miroslav Penkov

  Artist, Thinking, People

  Source: therumpus.net

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• If you discuss the beliefs of Christianity with the village diviner, the medicine man, he will say the white man must be extremely stupid. The white man must be profoundly troubled - probably torn by a huge guilt connected to how he treated the ancestors - to think that villagers would buy the idea that someone died on the cross for us. They would say these beliefs are evidence that the white people killed someone of great importance, probably a diviner and a healer. If you kill a healer, you must make amends by appeasing the healer's spirit.

  Malidoma Patrice Some

  Stupid, Men, Thinking

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there. My folks were Indian. Both my mother and father had Cherokee blood in them. I was born and raised in Indian Territory. 'Course we're not the Americans whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower, but we met them at the boat when they landed.

  Will Rogers

  Mother, Running, Father

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• The civilized people of today look back with horror at their medieval ancestors who wantonly destroyed great works of art or sat slothfully by while they destroyed. We have passed this stage.... Here in the U.S. we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping grounds, we pollute the air, we destroy our forests and exterminate fishes, birds and mammals - not to speak of vulgarizing charming landscapes with hideous advertisements. But at best it looks as if our people were awakening.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Art, Air, Rivers

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• Our ancestors had displayed great strengths in space science. What people like Aryabhata had said centuries ago are being recognised by science today. We are a country which had these capabilities. We need to regain them.

  Narendra Modi

  Country, Motivation, Space

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• If the blessings of our political and social condition have not been too highly estimated, we cannot well overrate the responsibility and duty which they impose upon us. We hold these institutions of government, religion, and learning, to be transmitted, as well as enjoyed. We are in the line of conveyance, through which whatever has been obtained by the spirit and efforts of our ancestors is to be communicated to our children.

  Daniel Webster

  Children, Responsibility, Blessing

  Daniel Webster (1853). “The Life, Eulogy, and Great Orations of Daniel Webster”

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• Our ape-like and arboreal ancestors entered upon the first of many short cuts. To crack a marrow-bone with a rock was the act which fathered the tool, and between the cracking of a marrow-bone and the riding down town in an automobile lies only a difference of degree.

  Jack London

  Lying, Cutting, Rocks

  Jack London (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Jack London (Illustrated)”, p.464, Delphi Classics

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• It is ourselves alone that make our days lucky or unlucky. Away, then, with a vain prejudice, the invention of the priesthood, which has been transmitted by our ancestors to an ignorant people.

  Voltaire

  People, Ignorant, Luck

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• Human emotions are a gift from our animal ancestors. Cruelty is a gift humanity has given itself.

  Thomas Harris

  Animal, Humanity, Emotion

  "Fictional character: Dr. Hannibal Lecter". TV Series "Hannibal" ("Coquilles", 2013), www.imdb.com. 2013–2015.

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• We have all this Paleolithic art that suggests that our ancestors really venerated animals and that they depended on wild animals to survive - as opposed to domesticated animals that we depend on. Would it radically change things if we had more rhinos in our midst? I kind of suspect it would.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Art, Animal, Kind

  "Pulitzer Winner Elizabeth Kolbert on Mass Extinctions - and Our Own Eventual One". Interview With Benjy Hansen-Bundy, www.motherjones.com. February 4, 2014.

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• Every living thing is, from the cosmic perspective, incredibly lucky simply to be alive. Most, 90 percent and more, of all the organisms that have ever lived have died without viable offspring, but not a single one of your ancestors, going back to the dawn of life on Earth, suffered that normal misfortune. You spring from an unbroken line of winners.

  Daniel Dennett

  Life, Spring, Perspective

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• Blues for me is having things not go your way - life, love, job, money, ... It is not about the oppression of my ancestors, who were trying to get back at the overseers. Blues is different for my generation.

  Robert Cray

  Jobs, Love Life, Trying

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• No self is of itself alone. It has a long chain of intellectual ancestors. The "I" is chained to ancestry by many factors ... This is not mere allegory, but an eternal memory.

  Erwin Schrodinger

  Memories, Self, Long

  "A Life of Erwin Schrödinger". Book by Walter Moore, 1994.

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• Entranced by the denotative power of words to define, to order, to represent the things around us, weve overlooked the songful dimension of language so obvious to our oral [storytelling] ancestors. Weve lost our ear for the music of language -- for the rhythmic, melodic layer of speech by which earthly things overhear us.

  David Abram

  Order, Ears, Speech

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• In a state of tranquility, wealth, and luxury, our descendants would forget the arts of war and the noble activity and zeal which made their ancestors invincible. Every art of corruption would be employed to loosen the bond of union which renders our resistance formidable. When the spirit of liberty which now animates our hearts and gives success to our arms is extinct, our numbers will accelerate our ruin and render us easier victims to tyranny.

  Samuel Adams

  Art, War, Luxury

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• And let me die suddenly, to be born again in the revelation of beauty....And the revelation of beauty is the wisdom of the ancestors.

  Aime Cesaire

  Beauty, Revelations, Born Again

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• You are human, whether your ancestors come from Europe, Asia, Africa, or wherever, shamanism once existed there. We are just attempting to go home to our spiritual roots before the state religions, the agrarian centralized religions rose up with autocratic government and said, 'This is what you're going to believe, these are the official revelations, take it from us, you can trust us, we got it.'

  Michael Harner

  Spiritual, Believe, Home

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• That's why we sail. So our children can grow up and be proud of whom they are. We are healing our souls by reconnecting to our ancestors. As we voyage we are creating new stories within the tradition of the old stories, we are literally creating a new culture out of the old.

  Nainoa Thompson

  Travel, Children, Growing Up

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• Ancestors do not mean so much. The rebel who succeeds generally makes it easier for the posterity that follows him; so these descendants are usually contented and smug and soft. Rebels are made from life, not ancestors.

  Clarence Darrow

  Mean, Rebel, Succeed

  Clarence Darrow (2015). “The Story of My Life”, p.15, Lulu.com

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• Whether our ancestors came here on the Mayflower, on slave ships, whether they came to Ellis Island or LAX in Los Angeles, whether they came yesterday or walked this land a thousand years ago our great challenge for the 21st century is to find a way to be One America. We can meet all the other challenges if we can go forward as One America.

  William J. Clinton

  Islands, Years, Slave Ships

  Clinton, William J. (2000). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton, 1999”, p.70, Best Books on

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