“We are ancients of the earth,
And in the morning of the times.”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) British poet laureate
The Daydream: L'Envoi, lines 231-32, from The Complete Works of Alfred Tennyson (1879)
“Direct observation of the testimony of the earth … is a matter of the laboratory, of the field naturalist, of indefatigable digging among the ancient archives of the earth's history.”
"Evolution and Religion", The New York Times (5 March 1922), p. 91; written in response to an article a few days earlier in which William Jennings Bryan challenged the theory of evolution as lacking proof.
Context: Direct observation of the testimony of the earth... is a matter of the laboratory, of the field naturalist, of indefatigable digging among the ancient archives of the earth's history. If Mr. Bryan, with an open heart and mind, would drop all his books and all the disputations among the doctors and study first hand the simple archives of Nature, all his doubts would disappear; he would not lose his religion; he would become an evolutionist.
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Henry Fairfield Osborn8
American geologist, paleontologist, and eugenist 1857–1935Related quotes
Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator
The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)
Context: The amount of organic matter that could have been produced in the first few hundred million years of Earth history was sufficient to have produced in the present ocean a several-percent solution of organic matter. This is just about the dilution of Knorr's chicken soup, and not that different from the composition either. And chicken soup is widely known to be good for life.
Anne Applebaum (1964) journalist
Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017) quoted at "Ukraine in the Flames of the 1917 Revolution" (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, September 13, 2017) https://huri.harvard.edu/news/ukraine-flames-1917-revolution
Samuel Adams (1722–1803) American statesman, Massachusetts governor, and political philosopher
Speech in Philadelphia (1776)
Variant: Driven from every other corner of the earth, freedom of thought and the right of private judgment in matters of conscience, direct their course to this happy country as their last asylum.
“As the ancient myth makers knew, we are children equally of the earth and the sky.”
Carl Sagan book Cosmos
Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 318
Context: The choice is with us still, but the civilization now in jeopardy is all humanity. As the ancient myth makers knew, we are children equally of the earth and the sky. In our tenure on this planet we've accumulated dangerous evolutionary baggage — propensities for aggression and ritual, submission to leaders, hostility to outsiders — all of which puts our survival in some doubt. But we've also acquired compassion for others, love for our children and desire to learn from history and experience, and a great soaring passionate intelligence — the clear tools for our continued survival and prosperity. Which aspects of our nature will prevail is uncertain, particularly when our visions and prospects are bound to one small part of the small planet Earth. But up there in the immensity of the Cosmos, an inescapable perspective awaits us. There are not yet any obvious signs of extraterrestrial intelligence and this makes us wonder whether civilizations like ours always rush implacably, headlong, toward self-destruction. National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars. Travel is broadening.
“What men are among the other formations of the earth, artists are among men.”
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) German poet, critic and scholar
Was die Menschen unter den andern Bildungen der Erde, das sind die Künstler unter den Menschen.
“Selected Ideas (1799-1800)”, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (Pennsylvania University Press:1968) # 43
Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister
Bk. III, Ch. 4.
Books, Coningsby (1844), Tancred (1847)
“Language is the archives of history … Language is fossil poetry.”
1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), The Poet