Descent Quotes - Page 5

• Of great interest to students and teachers of immigrant history as well as to those of Polish descent.

  Florian Znaniecki

  Teacher, Students, Interest

  William Isaac Thomas, Florian Znaniecki, Eli Zaretsky (1996). “The Polish Peasant in Europe and America: A Classic Work in Immigration History”, p.132, University of Illinois Press

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• I find the idea of common descent (that all organisms share a common ancestor) fairly convincing, and have no particular reason to doubt it.

  Michael Behe

  Ideas, Doubt, Common

  "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution". Book by Michael Behe, 1996.

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• I believe the evidence strongly supports common descent. But the root question remains unanswered: What has caused complex systems to form?

  Michael Behe

  Believe, Roots, Support

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• So far has Athens left the rest of mankind behind in thought and expression that her pupils have become the teachers of the world, and she has made the name of Hellas distinctive no longer of race but of intellect, and the title of Hellene a badge of education rather than of common descent.

  Isocrates

  Teacher, Race, Expression

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• A trip to the hospital is always a descent into the macabre. I have never trusted a place with shiny floors.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Never Trust, Macabre, Trusted

  Terry Tempest Williams (2015). “Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place”, p.26, Vintage

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• I am the father of a 9 year-old son whose descent into the world of autism began at the age of 7 months old after receiving numerous vaccinations in a single day; the same story that is told by thousands of other parents of children throughout the country whose healthy, normally developing children have become autistic after vaccinations.

  Rick Rollens

  Country, Children, Father

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• Hope changes everything. It changes winter into summer, darkness into dawn, descent into ascent, barrenness into creativity, agony into joy.

  Daisaku Ikeda

  Summer, Creativity, Winter

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• Whereas the health of an individual depends on the ego's regular descent and return to and from the unconscious, a society's longevity depends on actual people journeying into the unknown and returning with ideas.

  Dan Harmon

  Ideas, People, Ego

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• The pleasures of sin exist. We cannot deny them. But we also dare not deny what follows in their wake: a voracious appetite, inflamed with eroticism, demanding more indulgence more often until a degenerative spiral captures the soul and drags us on a never ending descent into deeper patterns of immorality and illicit behaviour... Lust goes beyond the sexual. Lust can show itself in a variety of forms: covetousness, gluttony, drunkeness, power hunger, or unbridled ambition, to name a few

  Edwin Louis Cole

  Ambition, Names, Soul

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• If you surrender everything to the government and give it total power to plan the whole economy, this will not guarantee your economic security, but it will guarantee the descent of the entire nation to a level of miserable poverty--as the practical results of every totalitarian economy, communist or fascist, have demonstrated.

  Ayn Rand

  Government, Giving, Guarantees

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• Fifty-thousand were gathered (March,27th,1933) in and around Madison Square Garden, supportive rallies were at that moment waiting in Chicago, Washington, San Francisco, Houston, and about seven other American cities. At each supportive rally, thousands huddled around loudspeakers waiting for the Garden event, which would be broadcast live via radio to 200 additional cities across the country. At least 1 million Jews were participating nationwide. Perhaps another million Americans of non-Jewish descent heritage stood with them.

  Edwin Black

  Country, Garden, San Francisco

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• The path of descent is the path of transformation. Darkness, failure, relapse, death, and woundedness are our primary teachers, rather than ideas or doctrines.

  Richard Rohr

  Teacher, Ideas, Darkness

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• It has made mincemeat of Barack Obama's pose of thoughtfulness. It has demonstrated that he lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the most basic economic realities. It has dramatized environmentalism's descent into infantilism.

  George Will

  Reality, Understanding, Notable

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• This is a time when it is frightening to be alive, when it is hard to think of human beings as rational creatures. Everywhere we look we see brutality, stupidity, until it seems that there is nothing else to be seen but that--a descent into barbarism, everywhere, which we are unable to check. But I think that while it is true there is a general worsening, it is precisely because things are so frightening we become hypnotized, and do not notice--or if we notice, belittle--equally strong forces on the other side, the forces, in short, of reason, sanity and civilization.

  Doris Lessing

  Strong, Thinking, Civilization

  Doris Lessing (2013). “Prisons We Choose to Live Inside”, p.3, Harper Collins

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• The result of the revolution in Germany has been to establish a democracy in the best sense of the word.  We are steering towards an order of things guaranteeing a process of a natural and reasonable selection in the domain of political leadership, thanks to which that leadership will be entrusted to the most competent, irrespective of their descent, name or fortune.  The memorable words of the great Corsican that every soldier carries a Field Marshal's baton in his knapsack, will find its political complement in Germany.

  Adolf Hitler

  Memorable, Order, Names

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• From yon blue heaven above us bent, The grand old gardener and his wife Smile at the claims of long descent.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Blue, Long, Wife

  Alfred Tennyson Tennyson, Baron, Alfred Lord Tennyson (2014). “Fifty Poems”, p.74, Cambridge University Press

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• I am not sure that any sight or sound on earth is as exquisite as the hushed descent of a sky full of snow.

  Parker J. Palmer

  Sight, Sky, Snow

  Parker J. Palmer (1999). “Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation”, p.101, John Wiley & Sons

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• I want to die at a hundred years old with an American flag on my back and the star of Texas on my helmet, after screaming down an Alpine descent on a bicycle at 75 miles per hour. I want to cross one last finish line as my wife and my ten children applaud, and then I want to lie down in a field of those famous French sunflowers and gracefully expire, the perfect contradiction to my once anticipated poignant early demise.

  Lance Armstrong

  Stars, Children, Lying

  "It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life". Book by Lance Armstrong, 2001.

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• Death was not to be a leap: it was to be a long descent under thickening shadows.

  George Eliot

  Long, Shadow, Dying

  George Eliot (1860). “The Mill on the Floss”, p.58

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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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• Tanya Ward Goodman, writing with a big heart, clear eyes, and a light touch, allows us a privileged glimpse into the shabby, enchanted world of traveling carnivals, roadside attractions, and a beloved, eccentric father’s descent into Alzheimers. Just as her dad animated the handcarved, miniature western world of Tinkertown from coat hangers, inner tubes and old sewing machine motors, Tanya Ward Goodman has fashioned her complex and often hilarious memories into a beguiling, wry, and moving work of art.

  Michelle Huneven

  Art, Dad, Memories

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• We Aryans are those of European descent who are racially conscious and who have committed our lives to our people's survival and evolutionary advancement. We shall do our duty. We shall not surrender our freedom and our very existence to Jewish or any other power. We shall preserve our heritage and our hard-won rights and freedoms. We shall guide our people up the evolutionary stairway to the stars.

  David Duke

  Stars, Rights, Ku Klux Klan

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• There is no comparing the brutality and cynicism of today's pop culture with that of forty years ago: from High Noon to Robocop is a long descent.

  Charles Krauthammer

  Years, Long, Society

  International Herald Tribune, October 31, 1990.

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• He who boasts of his descent, praises the deed of another.

  Seneca the Younger

  Family, Deeds, Ancestry

  "The Madness of Hercules". Book by Seneca the Younger, circa 54 AD.

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• If the human species, or indeed any part of the biosphere, is to continue to survive, it must eventually leave the Earth and colonize space. For the simple fact of the matter is, the planet Earth is doomed... Let us follow many environmentalists and regard the Earth as Gaia, the mother of all life (which indeed she is). Gaia, like all mothers, is not immortal. She is going to die. But her line of descent might be immortal. . . . Gaia's children might never die out-provided they move into space. The Earth should be regarded as the womb of life-but one cannot remain in the womb forever.

  Frank J. Tipler

  Mother, Children, Moving

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