“We are not princes of the earth, we are the descendants of worms, and any nobility must be earned.”

— PZ Myers

Context: Look at the bible as a pastiche, a collection of mutually and often internally inconsistent fragments slapped together for crude reasons of politics and art and priestly self-promotion and sometimes beauty and a lot of chest-thumping tribalism, and through that lens, it makes a lot of sense. It does tell us something important…about us, not some fantastic mythological being. It tells us that we are fractious, arrogant, scrappy people who sometimes accomplish great things and more often cause grief and pain to one another. We want to be special in a universe that is uncaring and cold, and in which the nature of our existence is a transient flicker, so we invent these strange stories of grand beginnings, like every orphan dreaming that they are the children of kings who will one day ride up on a white horse and take them away to a beautiful palace and a rich and healthy family that will love them forever. We are not princes of the earth, we are the descendants of worms, and any nobility must be earned.

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PZ Myers 13

American scientist and associate professor of biology 1957

Charles Caleb Colton (1777–1832) British priest and writer

Vol. II; CLXXVIII
Lacon (1820)

“[We are] not only prince and king, but set on such a pinnacle of dignity that we know no superior on earth.”

Henry VIII of England (1491–1547) King of England from 1509 until 1547

Source: Letter to William Benet (September 1530), quoted in J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (1968; 1971 ed.), p. 350

“To descend into ourselves, we must first lift ourselves up.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

“We must not, by any whimsical conceits supposed to be adapted to the altering fashions of the times, overturn the established law of the land: it descended to us as a sacred charge, and it is our duty to preserve it.”

Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon (1732–1802) British Baron

Clayton v. Adams (1796), 6 T. R. 605.

“There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.”

Václav Havel book The Power of the Powerless

Source: Living in Truth (1986), The Power of the Powerless

“We are all worms. But I do believe I am a glow-worm.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

As quoted by Violet Bonham-Carter in Winston Churchill as I Knew Him (1965), according to The Yale Book of Quotations (2006), Fred R. Shapiro, Yale University Press, p. 155 ISBN 0300107986
Post-war years (1945–1955)
Source: Never Give In!: The Best of Winston Churchill's Speeches

“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

"The New York Magazine Environmental Teach-In" by Elizabeth Barlow in New York Magazine (30 March 1970), p. 30 http://books.google.com/books?id=cccDAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover#PPA30,M1
1970s
Context: We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.