Descendants Quotes - Page 8

• Creeds, like other goods, pass by inheritance to descendants.

  Amos Bronson Alcott

  Inheritance, Belief, Creeds

  Amos Bronson Alcott (1877). “Table-talk”

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• No grant of feudal privilege has ever equaled, for effortless return, that of the grandparent who bought and endowed his descendants with a thousand shares of General Motors or General Electric.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Grandparent, Return, Privilege

  john kenneth galbraith (1971). “the new industrial state”

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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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• An old paleontological in joke proclaims that mammalian evolution is a tale told by teeth mating to produce slightly altered descendant teeth.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Teeth, Evolution, Tales

  Stephen Jay Gould (1990). “Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History”, p.60, W. W. Norton & Company

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• After all, in both languages we were dealing in large measure not with English and French, but with Scots and Irish, Bretons and Normans ... There could be no more eloquent illustration of the colonial mind-set than a bunch of Celts and Vikings in a distant northern territory insulting each other as les Anglais and the French as if they were the descendants of the people who had subjected and ruined them.

  John Ralston Saul

  Illustration, People, Insulting

  "Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century". Book by John Ralston Saul, 1997.

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• The descendants of those who crucified Christ... have taken ownership of the riches of the world, a minority has taken ownership of the gold of the world, the silver, the minerals, water, the good lands, petrol, well, the riches, and they have concentrated the riches in a small number of hands.

  Hugo Chavez

  Taken, Small Numbers, Hands

  Hugo Chavez's Christmas speech at a rehabilitation center, December 24, 2005.

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• If Columbus was the first to discover the islands, Americus Vespucius and Cabot, and the Puritans, and we their descendants, havediscovered only the shores of America.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Islands, America, Firsts

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.560, Delphi Classics

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• If we would understand the Scientific Revolution correctly, we should always remember that its most powerful impetus was the unremitting search for hidden divinity. As such, it is a direct descendant of the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

  Julian Jaynes

  Powerful, Mind, Revolution

  Julian Jaynes (1990). “The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)

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• In the beginning, there were bacteria.... [A] nearly universal assumption is that all subsequent life descended from the original life form through a continuous chain of ancestor-descendant pairs. This assumption looks good because all living organisms share biochemical traits. It is conceivable, of course, that life originated more than once on the early earth but that all except one life form died out early, leaving a single lineage as the ancestor of life as we know it. If this did happen, it was the first important species extinction.

  David M. Raup

  Leaving, Important, Earth

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• We live in an age of apologies. Apologies, fake or true, are expected from the descendants of empire builders, slave owners and persecutors of heretics, and from men who -in our eyes- just got it all wrong. So, with the age of 85 coming up shortly, I want to make an apology. It appears I must apologize for being male, white, and European.

  Alec Guinness

  Eye, Apology, Men

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• But the United States is neither a Christian nation nor the exclusive home of any particular religious group. Non-Christians are not guests. We are as much hosts as any Mayflower-descendant Protestant. It is our home as well as theirs. And in a home with so many owners, there can be no official sectarian prayer. That is what the First Amendment is all about, and the first act by the new administration was in defiance of our Constitution.

  Alan Dershowitz

  Christian, Religious, Prayer

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• Modern storytellers are the descendants of an immense and ancient community of holy people, troubadours, bards, griots, cantadoras, cantors, traveling poets, bums, hags and crazy people.

  Clarissa Pinkola Estes

  Crazy, People, Community

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• We examine and highlight the history of the African descendants in America, and know that each and every one of us has come this far because of our faith in this country.

  Yvette Clarke

  Country, America, Highlights

  "Black History Is American History" by Rep. Yvette D. Clarke, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 10, 2010.

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• Descendants of pigeons once fed by Keats, Byron, George Sand, Chopin and many other famous lovers are still being fed, and the sudden sound when they all rise together, frightened away, is like the sound of giant sails flapping.

  Anais Nin

  Venice, Together, Sound

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• Thackeray and Balzac will make it possible for our descendants to live over again the England and France of to-day. Seen in this light, the novelist has a higher office than merely and amuse his contemporaries.

  Philip Gilbert Hamerton

  Light, Office, Novelists

  Philip Gilbert Hamerton (1873). “Thoughts about Art”, p.1

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• Men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several centuries. In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past.

  James Russell Lowell

  Past, Men, Forever

  "The poetical works of John Keats. With a memoir, by James Russell Lowell" by John Keats, James Russell Lowell, New York: J. Miller, 1871.

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• In the founders of great families, titles or attributes of honor are generally correspondent with the virtues of the person to whom they are applied; but in their descendants they are too often the marks rather of grandeur than of merit. The stamp and denomination still continue, but the intrinsic value is frequently lost.

  Joseph Addison

  Honor, Titles, Ancestry

  Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele (1819). “The Spectator”, p.21

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• Being well satisfied that, for a man who thinks himself to be somebody, there is nothing more disgraceful than to hold himself up as honored, not on his own account, but for the sake of his forefathers. Yet hereditary honors are a noble and splendid treasure to descendants.

  Plato

  Men, Thinking, Honor

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• Wrong cannot have a legal descendant.

  Thomas Paine

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• I don't know exactly why the notion of homeownership has such a grasp on the American imagination. Perhaps as descendants of landless immigrants we turn our plots into symbols of stability.

  Ellen Goodman

  Home, Imagination, Plot

  Ellen Goodman (1986). “Close to Home”, Fawcett Books

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• Catherine the Great, like others of her kind, did not succeed in imparting greatness to her descendants.

  Katharine Anthony

  Greatness, Succeed, Kind

  Katharine Susan Anthony (1925). “Catherine the Great”

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• There will he nothing more that posterity can add to our immoral habits; our descendants must have the same desires and act the same follies as their sires. Every vice has reached its zenith.

  Juvenal

  Desire, Vices, Add

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• Imagine our descendants in the year 2200 or 2500. They might liken us to aliens who have treated the Earth as if it were a mere stopover for refueling, or even worse, characterize us as barbarians who would ransack their own home.

  Paul J. Crutzen

  Home, Years, Barbarians

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• The land promised to Abraham and his descendants is once again theirs. God always keeps His promises. Even in times of cataclysmic upheaval and change, God's love and faithfulness are unchanging.

  Lynn Austin

  Land, Promise, Upheaval

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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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