Quotes about ancestor (429 quotes, page 2)

“Some researchers have speculated that religion itself may have played an important role in getting large groups of prehistoric humans to socially cohere. If this is true, we can say that religion has served an important purpose. This does not suggest, however, that it serves an important purpose now. There is, after all, nothing more natural than rape. But no one would argue that rape is good, or compatible with a civil society, because it may have had evolutionary advantages for our ancestors. That religion may have served some necessary function for us in the past does not preclude the possibility that it is now the greatest impediment to our building a global civilization.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Source: 2000s, Letter to a Christian Nation (2006), p. 90-91

Religion , Nature , Past

“The intelligence recedes, no more a tool of learning - because knowledge is based on experience - but a tool of the outside world it is deprived of knowing. It tries to contact other minds by telepathy; it becomes the Ancestor. Words and Numbers come to hold mystic significance: they were invented by some arcane magic older than man. The line between the word and the thing vanishes; the intervals of numbers in infinity collapse with infinity.”

Jack Abbott book In the Belly of the Beast

In the Belly of the Beast (1981)

World , Intelligence , Knowledge , Learning

“Our forefathers and ancestors of all times have been of this nature and disposition, that, upon the winning of a battle, they have chosen rather, for a sign and memorial of their triumphs and victories, to erect trophies and monuments in the hearts of the vanquished by clemency than by architecture in the lands which they had conquered. For they did hold in greater estimation the lively remembrance of men purchased by liberality than the dumb inscription of arches, pillars, and pyramids, subject to the injury of storms and tempests, and to the envy of everyone.”

Francois Rabelais book Gargantua and Pantagruel

Source: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1564), Gargantua (1534), Chapter 50 : Gargantua's speech to the vanquished.

Men , Nature , Memory , Time

“Molecular evidence suggests that our common ancestor with chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between five and seven million years ago, say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards … in your left hand you hold the right hand of your mother. In turn she holds the hand of her mother, your grandmother. Your grandmother holds her mother's hand, and so on … How far do we have to go until we reach our common ancestor with the chimpanzees? It is a surprisingly short way. Allowing one yard per person, we arrive at the ancestor we share with chimpanzees in under 300 miles.”

Richard Dawkins book A Devil's Chaplain

"Gaps in the Mind"
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)

Way , Personality

“Survival—of the species of the culture of the faith—has a biological dimension. What would have befallen our Hominid ancestors had they implemented gender parity in their hunter-gatherer societies—sometimes the women hunt while the men forage and mind the kids, and vice versa?”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

" Emasculated West Primed For A Muscular, Muslim Takeover http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/263677/emasculated-west-primed-muscular-muslim-takeover-ilana-mercer," FrontPage Magazine, July 29, 2016.
2010s, 2016

Women , Men , Faith

“Just as every human being has an ancestry, unknown to him though it may be; so every idea, every incident, every movement has in the past its own long chain of causes, without which it could not have been. Formerly we were glad to let the dead bury their dead: nowadays we turn lovingly to the records, whether of persons or things; and we busy ourselves willingly among origins, even without conscious utilitarian end. We are no longer proud of having ancestors, since every one has them; but we are more than ever interested in our ancestors, now that we find in them the fragments which compose our very selves.”

Sidney Webb, 1st Baron Passfield (1859–1947) British Baron and politician

Fabian Essays in Socialism – The Basis of Socialism – Historic http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Shaw/shwFS1.html#The%20Basis%20of%20Socialism,%20Historic,%20by%20Sidney%20Webb, The Development of the Democratic Ideal, I.1.1. Edited by George Bernard Shaw (1889)

Idea , Business , Past , Personality

“The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless. 2. Sudden appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and “fully formed.””

Stephen Jay Gould book The Panda's Thumb

"The Episodic Nature of Evolutionary Change", p. 182
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

History , Appearance , Change

“Honor, justice and humanity call upon us to hold and to transmit to our posterity, that liberty, which we received from our ancestors. It is not our duty to leave wealth to our children; but it is our duty to leave liberty to them. No infamy, iniquity, or cruelty can exceed our own if we, born and educated in a country of freedom, entitled to its blessings and knowing their value, pusillanimously deserting the post assigned us by Divine Providence, surrender succeeding generations to a condition of wretchedness from which no human efforts, in all probability, will be sufficient to extricate them; the experience of all states mournfully demonstrating to us that when arbitrary power has been established over them, even the wisest and bravest nations that ever flourished have, in a few years, degenerated into abject and wretched vassals.”

John Dickinson (1732–1808) American politician

From ‘A Duty to Posterity’, as contained in A Library of American Literature From the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time, Volume 3, ed. Edmund Clarence Stedman, C. L. Webster (1892), pp. 177-178

Children , Education , Justice , Effort

“We do not and will not promote 'two Chinas', 'one China and one Taiwan' or 'Taiwan independence'. Taiwan and Mainland China share the common heritage. Both sides of the Taiwan Strait are part of the Chinese nation. Their people are descendants of the same ancestors. The people of mainland China and the people of Taiwan share a common bloodline, history and culture. And after five years of peaceful exchange, the two sides have created an unprecedented horizon for the Chinese nation, as well as set an example, not only for East Asia but also for the entire world, on how to settle disputes peacefully. With mutual non-recognition of sovereignty and mutual non-denial of jurisdiction as guiding principles, both sides should continue to expand and deepen their ties in areas such as commerce, culture, technology, environmental protection and human rights.”

Ma Ying-jeou (1950) Taiwanese politician, president of the Republic of China

Ma Ying-jeou (2013) cited in: " Gov't won't push 2 Chinas, independence: Ma http://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/china-taiwan-relations/2013/04/30/377336/Govt-wont.htm" in The Taipei Times, 30 April 2013.
Statement made during the 20th anniversary of Koo-Wang Talks at the Straits Exchange Foundation in Taipei, 28 April 2013.
Strait issues

People , World , Peace , History

“…it was Darwin’s chief contribution, not only to Biology but to the whole of natural science, to have brought to light a process by which contingencies a priori improbable, are given, in the process of time, an increasing probability, until it is their non-occurrence rather than their occurrence which becomes highly improbable. … Let the reader … attempt to calculate the prior probability that a hundred generations of his ancestry in the direct male line should each have left at least one son. The odds against such a contingency as it would have appeared to his hundredth ancestor (about the time of King Solomon) would require for their expression forty- four figures of the decimal notation; yet this improbable event has certainly happened.”

Ronald Fisher (1890–1962) English statistician, evolutionary biologist, geneticist, and eugenicist

Retrospect of criticisms of the theory of natural selection. In Evolution as a Process, eds. J.S.Huxley, A.C.Hardy and E.B.Ford, London: Allen and Unwin, 1954.
1950s

Nature , Light , Appearance , Science

“Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.”

Jonas Salk (1914–1995) Inventor of polio vaccine

As quoted in Learning from the Future : Competitive Foresight Scenarios (1998) by Liam Fahey and Robert M. Randall, p. 332. Also as quoted in Edward Cornish, Responsibility for the Future, The Futurist (May/June 1994), p. 60.

“We live always under the weight of the old and odious customs … of our barbarous ancestors.”

Guy De Maupassant book Sur l'eau

Sur l’eau (1888)

“The institutions which our ancestors established to to sustain and defend democracy in this country are still with us today, more than two hundred years later.”

John Allen Fraser (1931) Canadian politician

Afterword, p. 172
The House Of Commons At Work (1993)

Democracy , Country

“English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.”

Roy Blount Jr. (1941) American writer

Alphabet Juice (2008), p. 93.

Painting

“It is a fact not to be disputed, that the aristocracy have not "progressed " in proportion to the other classes. A young nobleman of the present day has not a better education than his ancestor in the time of Elizabeth.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Monthly Magazine

Education , Time

“I emphatically call your attention to the obvious fact that the primitive Christian doctrine is a specific demand for the suicide of our race, which survived from the end of the Roman Empire to the present only because our ancestors, of fresh barbarian stock, simply ignored in practice a large part of the pernicious doctrine, especially in northern Europe under essentially aristocratic régimes. Until the disintegration of Protestantism made it possible for any ambitious tailor, clever confidence man, or disgruntled housewife to have "revelations" and pitch the woo at lower classes to make themselves important or fleece the suckers, the professional holy men either contented themselves with telling our people they were "sinful" or used the common devices of theologians to conceal the import of the holy book.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

Even so, however, the Catholic dervishes are obviously responsible for the eventual dominance of mestizos in "Latin" America, and many similar misfortunes.
The Jewish Strategy, Chapter 12 "Christianity"
1990s, The Jewish Strategy (2001)

Men , People , Books , Confidence

“In no particular order, I could not or would not exist without air, food, water, gravity, tides, the moon, the sun, night, civilization, the laws of physics, the laws of thermodynamics, the law of the land, ancestors having sex, DNA, viruses, bacteria, plants, animals, oceans, ice caps, the kindness of strangers, the Big Bang, familial bonds, smart people, brave people, memory, medicine, the periodic table of elements, tribal instincts, magnetic fields, weather, Earth's molten core, a rotating Earth, a tilted Earth, tectonic plates, sleep, death, heat, consciousness, evolution, teachers and the miraculous, self-regulating chemical factory that is my body. Other than that, I like to think of myself as a self-made man.”

Chuck Lorre (1952) American screenwriter

Chuck Lorre Productions, Vanity Card #469 (1st Aired: 6 Nov 2014) http://www.chucklorre.com/index-mom.php?p=469

Death , People , Family , Law

“If there's anyone out there who still doubts that Ireland is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our ancestors is alive in our time, who still questions our capacity to restore ourselves, reinvent ourselves and prosper, today is your answer.”

Enda Kenny (1951) Irish Fine Gael politician and Taoiseach

Introducing Barack Obama in College Green, he later denied plagiarism despite 36 of his first 48 words being the exact same as an earlier speech by Obama. Irish Central http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Enda-Kenny-denies-plagiarizing-Barack-Obama-speech-from-2008-122512474.html
2010s

Dreams , Question , Time

“When then, my Lords, are all the generous efforts of our ancestors, are all those glorious contentions, by which they meant to secure themselves, and to transmit to their posterity, a known law, a certain rule of living, reduced to this conclusion, that instead of the arbitrary power of a King, we must submit to the arbitrary power of a House of Commons? If this be true, what benefit do we derive from the exchange? Tyranny, my Lords, is detestable in every shape; but in none is it so formidable as where it is assumed and exercised by a number of tyrants. But, my Lords, this is not the fact, this is not the constitution; we have a law of Parliament, we have a code in which every honest man may find it. We have Magna Charta, we have the Statute-book, and we have the Bill of Rights…It is to your ancestors, my Lords, it is to the English barons that we are indebted for the laws and constitution we possess. Their virtues were rude and uncultivated, but they were great and sincere…I think that history has not done justice to their conduct, when they obtained from their Sovereign that great acknowledgment of national rights contained in Magna Charta: they did not confine it to themselves alone, but delivered it as a common blessing to the whole people…A breach has been made in the constitution—the battlements are dismantled—the citadel is open to the first invader—the walls totter—the place is no longer tenable.—What then remains for us but to stand foremost in the breach, to repair it, or to perish in it?…let us consider which we ought to respect most—the representative or the collective body of the people. My Lords, five hundred gentlemen are not ten millions; and, if we must have a contention, let us take care to have the English nation on our side. If this question be given up, the freeholders of England are reduced to a condition baser than the peasantry of Poland…Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it; and this I know, my Lords, that where law ends, there tyranny begins.”

William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham (1708–1778) British politician

Speech in the House of Lords on John Wilkes (9 January 1770), quoted in William Pitt, The Speeches of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chatham in the Houses of Lords and Commons: With a Biographical Memoir and Introductions and Explanatory Notes to the Speeches (London: Aylott & Jones, 1848), pp. 90-4.

People , Books , Justice , Law

“You see, if you say something positive like the whole of life – all living things – is descended from a single common ancestor which lived about 4,000 million years ago and that we are all cousins, well that is an exceedingly important and true thing to say and that is what I want to say. Somebody who is religious sees that as threatening and so I am represented as attacking religion, and I am forced into responding to their reaction. But you do not have to see my main purpose as attacking religion. Certainly I see the scientific view of the world as incompatible with religion, but that is not what is interesting about it. It is also incompatible with magic, but that also is not worth stressing. What is interesting about the scientific world view is that it is true, inspiring, remarkable and that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single heading. And that is what is so exciting for me.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

[1995-04-28, Kam Patel, Going the whole hog, Times Higher Education, http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=97718&sectioncode=26]

Life , World , Religion

“Misguided people sometimes create misguided ideas. Some of my ancestors were Oromo. How can I colonize myself?”

Haile Selassie (1892–1975) Emperor of Ethiopia

Disputed

People , Idea

“… if you look at crocodiles today, they aren’t really representative of what the lineage of crocodiles look like. Crocodiles are represented by about 23 species, plus or minus a couple. Along that lineage the more primitive members weren’t aquatic. A lot of them were bipedal, a lot of them looked like little dinosaurs. Some were armored, others had no teeth. They were all fully terrestrial. So this is just the last vestige of that radiation that we’re seeing. And the ancestor of both dinosaurs and crocodiles would have, to the untrained eye, looked much more like a dinosaur.”

Mark Norell (1957) American paleontologist

As quoted in "How Dinosaurs Loved: An Interview with Dr. Mark Norell on Dino Relations" http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/t-rexxx-how-dinosaurs-lived-loved-and-tasted-q-a-with-dr-mark-norell-american-museum-of-natural-history, Vice (March 20, 2012)

“Beloved guests, in what form does God, the Creator of all things in the universe, exist? God exists as the dual characteristics of a subject partner in the male position and object partner in the female position. God created Adam and Eve, the first human ancestors, by dividing the male and female positions within Himself. The children of Adam and Eve were to have been created in the same pattern of male and female as a result of the union formed by Adam and Eve.”

Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) Korean religious leader

The Holy Marriage Blessing is the Path to Unite the Virtues of Heaven and Earth and Harmonize and Unify the Universe as One http://www.unification.net/2005/20050820.html (2005-08-20)

God , Children , Universe

“We are reduced to the alternative of choosing an unconditional submission to the tyranny of irritated ministers or resistance by force. The latter is our choice. We have counted the cost of this contest, and find nothing so dreadful as voluntary slavery. Honour, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us.”

John Dickinson (1732–1808) American politician

From Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Causes_and_Necessity_of_Taking_Up_Arms, adopted by the Second Continental Congress (1775)

Justice , Freedom

“The Jews might well, were they of such a mind (as I am, lament the disappearance of all those who painted the wooden synagogues in the small towns and villages - oh why haven't I gone to my grave with them!), and the carvers of the wooden 'school mallets' – 'quiet boy!' (and if you should see them in Ansky’s collection, you’ll get a shock!). But is there really any difference between my ancestor from Mohiliev, who painted the synagogue there, and myself, who painted the Jewish theatre in Moscow (and a good theater it is at that)?… I am convinced that, were I to stop shaving, you would see in me a deceptive likeness.”

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) French artist and painter

after 1930
Source: 'Shtrom' No. 1, 1922, Marc Chagall; as quoted in 'Chagall and the Jewish art programme', by Grigory Kasovsky
Chagall's quote is explaining his relation to the Jewish society and Jewish art history 'Bletlach' (Leaflet - essay in Yiddish)

School , Boy , Painting

“As we read this, we stand in the plane of the present; we are the sum of all our ancestors, and the origin of all our descendents. In terms of our model, we are at an ever-changing origin, located on the boundary of past and future. As well, we are spinning with the earth, spiralling with the galaxy, and expanding or contracting with the universe. As origins, we are on the move in time and space, and all these movements have a characteristic pulse rate.”

Bill Mollison (1928–2016) Australian permaculturist

Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 4.19

Universe , Change , Time , Reading

“Yes; I am indebted for that estate, and I am proud here to acknowledge it, to the bounty of my countrymen. That estate was the scene of my birth and of my infancy; it was the property of my ancestors; it is by the munificence of my countrymen that this small estate, which had been alienated by my father from necessity, has again come into my hands, and that I am enabled to light up again the hearth of my fathers; and I say that there is no warrior duke who owns a vast domain by the vote of the Imperial Parliament who holds his property by a more honourable title than that by which I possess mine.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech in Aylesbury, responding to a heckler who accused Cobden of getting his property through Anti-Corn Law League funds (9 January 1853), quoted in John Bright and J. E. Thorold Rogers (eds.), Speeches on Questions of Public Policy by Richard Cobden, M.P. Volume I (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908), pp. 225-6.
1850s

Birth , Light

“The pursuits of commerce would be as admirable as they are profitable if they were not subject to so great risks: and so, likewise, of banking, if it was always honestly conducted. For our ancestors considered, and so ordained in their laws, that, while the thief should be cast in double damages, the usurer should make four-fold restitution.”

Cato the Elder book De Agri Cultura

Introduction: of the dignity of the farmer
De Agri Cultura, about 160 BC

Law

“I have to go back a bit in time, to explain why. Everybody thinks that we Indians first rose against British colonial rule in 1857. In 1741, Travancore was the only Asian power to defeat the Dutch when they arrived here. After the battle, all the Dutch soldiers kneeled before my ancestors. One Dutchman, Benedictus Eustachius, even joined our army. We called him the Great Kapitan. Later, I learned that he was [US president] Franklin Roosevelt's ancestor when the latter's grandson came to look at our historical records.”

Uthradom Thirunal Marthanda Varma (1922–2013) Maharaja of Travancore

On his being to frugal in lifestyle in spite of being one of the richest families in India, and the British rule in “The riches belong to nobody, certainly not to our family.”
The riches belong to nobody, certainly not to our family, 2009

Thinking , Learning , Time

“It was a doctrine old as the common law, maintained by our Anglo-Saxon ancestors centuries before it was planted in the American Colonies, that taxation and representation were inseparable correlatives, the one a duty based upon the other as a right But the neglect of the government to provide a system which made the Parliamentary representation conform to the increase of population, and the growth and decadence of cities and boroughs, had, by almost imperceptible degrees, disfranchised the great mass of the British people, and placed the legislative power in the hands of a few leading families of the realm. Towards the close of the last century the question of Parliamentary reform assumed a definite shape, and since that time has constituted one of the most prominent features in British politics. It was found not only that the basis of representation was unequal and unjust, but that the right of the elective franchise was granted to but few of the inhabitants, and was regulated by no fixed and equitable rule. Here I may quote from May's Constitutional History: 'In some of the corporate towns, the inhabitants paying scot and lot, and freemen, were admitted to vote; in some, the freemen only; and in many, none but the governing body of the corporation. At Buckingham and at Bewdley the right of election was confined to the bailiff and twelve burgesses; at Bath, to the mayor, ten aldermen, and twenty-four common-councilmen; at Salisbury, to the mayor and corporation, consisting of fifty-six persons. And where more popular rights of election were acknowledged, there were often very few inhabitants to exercise them. Gatton enjoyed a liberal franchise. All freeholders and inhabitants paying scot and lot were entitled to vote, but they only amounted to seven. At Tavistock all freeholders rejoiced in the franchise, but there were only ten. At St. Michael all inhabitants paying scot and lot were electors, but there were only seven. In 1793 the Society of the Friends of the People were prepared to prove that in England and Wales seventy members were returned by thirty-five places in which there were scarcely any electors at all; that ninety members were returned by forty-six places with less than fifty electors; and thirty-seven members by nineteen places having not more than one hundred electors. Such places were returning members, while Leeds, Birmingham, and Manchester were unrepresented; and the members whom they sent to Parliament were the nominees of peers and other wealthy patrons. No abuse was more flagrant than the direct control of peers over the constitution of the Lower House. The Duke of Norfolk was represented by eleven members; Lord Lonsdale by nine; Lord Darlington by seven; the Duke of Rutland, the Marquis of Buckingham, and Lord Carrington, each by six. Seats were held in both Houses alike by hereditary right.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1860s, Oration at Ravenna, Ohio (1865)

People , Family , Law , Quotes

“No government, at that time, appeared in the world, nor is perhaps to be found in the records of any history, which subsisted without the mixture of some arbitrary authority, committed to some magistrate; and it might reasonably, beforehand, appear doubtful, whether human society could ever arrive at that state of perfection, as to support itself with no other control, than the general and rigid maxims of law and equity. But the parliament justly thought, that the King was too eminent a magistrate to be trusted with discretionary power, which he might so easily turn to the destruction of liberty. And in the event it has been found, that, though some inconveniencies arise from the maxim of adhering strictly to law, yet the advantages so much overbalance them, as should render the English forever grateful to the memory of their ancestors, who, after repeated contests, at last established that noble principle.”

David Hume The History of England

Volume V, Chapter LIV (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983), pp. 329-30; referring to the abolition of the Star Chamber
The History of England (1754-62)

World , Law , History , Support

“If these Commentaries shall but inspire in the rising generation a more ardent love of their country, an unquenchable thirst for liberty, and a profound reverence for the constitution and the union, then they will have accomplished all that their author ought to desire. Let the American youth never forget that they possess a noble inheritance, bought by the toils, and sufferings, and blood of their ancestors; and capable, if wisely improved, and faithfully guarded, of transmitting to their latest posterity all the substantial blessings of life, the peaceful enjoyment of liberty, property, religion, and independence. The structure has been erected by architects of consummate skill and fidelity; its foundations are solid; its compartments are beautiful as well as useful; its arrangements are full of wisdom and order; and its defences are impregnable from without. It has been reared for immortality, if the work of man may justly aspire to such a title. It may, nevertheless, perish in an hour by the folly, or corruption, or negligence of its only keepers, THE PEOPLE. Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people in order to betray them.”

Joseph Story book Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States

Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, 2d ed. (1851), vol. 2, chapter 45, p. 617. This passage was not in the first edition, but in all later editions.

Love , Life , Wisdom , People

“If we confuse dissent with disloyalty — if we deny the right of the individual to be wrong, unpopular, eccentric or unorthodox — if we deny the essence of racial equality then hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa who are shopping about for a new allegiance will conclude that we are concerned to defend a myth and our present privileged status. Every act that denies or limits the freedom of the individual in this country costs us the … confidence of men and women who aspire to that freedom and independence of which we speak and for which our ancestors fought.”

Edward R. Murrow (1908–1965) Television journalist

Ford Fiftieth Anniversary Show, CBS and NBC (June 1953)

Women , Men , Confidence , Freedom

“A second slash ended the monster’s misery. So, he thought, this is how my Earthling ancestors ran their affairs. This is how lands were won, empires expanded, insurrections resisted, prisoners taken, slaves kept, heretics converted, captives made loquacious. For the first time in his life, Minnix felt himself a part of history.
History, he decided, was a terrible idea.”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 18 (p. 223)

Life , History , Idea , Time

“Most people agree that slavery is immoral. But what makes it so? Slavery denies a person the right to use his property (body) and the fruits of his labor the way he sees fit. Slavery forcibly uses one person to serve the purposes of another. Tragically, most Americans, including blacks, whose ancestors have suffered from gross property right violations, think it quite proper that one person be forcibly used to serve the purposes of another.”

Walter E. Williams (1936) American economist, commentator, and academic

2010s, Markets, Governments, and the Common Good

People , Way , Thinking , Suffering

“Long long ago, before the days of Islam, Sikander e Aazem came to India. The Two Horned one whom you British people call Alexander the Great. He conquered the world, and was a very great man, brave and dauntless and generous to his followers. When he left to go back to Greece, some of his men did not wish to go back with him but preferred to stay here. Their leader was a general called Shalakash (Seleucus). With some of his officers and men, he came to these valleys and they settled here and took local women, and here they stayed. We, the Kalash, the Black Kafir of the Hindu Kush, are the descendants of their children. Still some of our words are the same as theirs, our music and our dances, too; we worship the same gods. This is why we believe the Greeks are our first ancestors…”

Michael Wood (1948) English historian and broadcaster

Statement made by a Kalash named Kazi Khushnawaz, "Footsteps of Alexander the Great p. 8
i.e.: Seleucus was one of the Generals of Alexander the Great. He was born in 358 or 354 BC in the town of Europos, Macedonia and died in August/September 281 BC near Lysimathia, Thrace.

Women , Men , God , Children

“Posterity always degenerates till it becomes our ancestors.”

Horace Walpole (1717–1797) English art historian, man of letters, antiquarian and Whig politician

As quoted in "The Works of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford" in The Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal, Vol. 27 (1798) edited by Ralph Griffiths, p. 187

“Our ancestors in the ages that are gone really believed that by force you could convince a man. You cannot change the conclusion of the brain by force, but I will tell you what you can do by force, and what you have done by force. You can make hypocrites by the million.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

[www.gutenberg.org/files/8389/8389-h/8389-h.htm#liberty] Ingersoll's Lecture on Liberty of Man, Woman and Child

Age , Change

“As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved Echo of our ancestors, the virgin America. has been abandoned. We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves.”

Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) American historian

Source: The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), p. 257.

Love , Suffering

“For the future I cease, Death approaches with little delay,
Since the dragons of Laune and Lane and Lee are destroyed;
I’ll follow the heroes far from the light of day,
The princes my ancestors followed before Christ died.”

Egan O'Rahilly (1670–1726) Irish poet

Closing lines of his last known poem (c.1729)
Translated from the Irish by Owen Dudley Edwards, as quoted in Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations (2005), p. 626

Death , Light , Future , Christ

“The Sultan advanced to the fortifications of Kanauj, which consisted of seven distinct forts, washed by the Ganges which flowed under them like the ocean. In Kanauj there were nearly ten thousand temples, which the idolaters falsely and absurdly represented to have been founded by their ancestors two or three hundred thousand years ago. They worshipped and offered their vows and supplications to them in consequence of their great antiquity. Many of the inhabitants of the place fled and were scattered abroad like so many wretched widows and orphans, from the fear which oppressed them, in consequence of witnessing the fate of their deaf and dumb idols. Many of them thus effected their escape, and those who did not fly were put to death. The Sultan took all seven forts in one day, and gave his soldiers leave to plunder them and take prisoners.”

Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030) Sultan of Ghazni

About the conquest of Kanauj (Uttar Pradesh). Elliot and Dowson, Vol. II : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. pp. 44-46 Also quoted (in part) in Jain, Meenakshi (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts.
Quotes from Tarikh Yamini (Kitabu-l Yamini) by Al Utbi

Death , Fate , Fear , Falseness

“No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward a time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more "modern," but more ancient than those of our Revolutionary ancestors.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

Foundations of the Republic; Speeches and Addresses (1926), p. 451.
1920s

People , Truth , Idea , Time

“Until the family and the church can be roused to the full height of their responsibility we cannot expect to find the youth of the land in possession of that religious knowledge and religious feeling which were characteristic of their ancestors two or three generations ago.”

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) American philosopher, diplomat, and educator

Liberty-Equality-Fraternity (1942)

Youth , Family , Feeling , Knowledge

“Prayer is decisive element of victory. Wars are won by those who have managed to attract from elsewhere, from the skies, the mysterious forces of the invisible world and to secure their support. These mysterious forces are the souls of the dead, the souls of our ancestors, who once were, like us, linked to our clods, to our furrows, who died for the defense of this land and are still linked today to it by the memory of their lives and by us, their sons, their grandsons, their great grandsons. But, above the souls of the dead, there is God. Once these forces are attracted, they are of considerable power, they defend us, they give us courage, will, all the elements necessary to victory and which make us win. They bring in panic and terror among the enemies, paralyse their activity. In the last analysis, victories do not depend only on material preparation, on the material forces of the belligerents, but on their power to secure the support of spiritual forces. The fairness and the morality of actions and the fervent, insistent call for them in the form of rite and collective prayer attract such forces.”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Religion

God , War , World , Soul

“[Footnote:] Pliny the Elder described a Whale called "Balaena or Whirlpool, which is so long and broad as to take up more in length and breadth than two acres of ground." This brings up again the old question: Are the classics doomed? Our ancestors believed that four years of this sort of information would inevitably produce a President, or at least a Cabinet Member. It didn't seem to work out that way.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Whale
How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes (1931)

Way , Question

“Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

Page 3
A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)

Life , Fate , Mountain , Time

“The peaceful Indian Mussalman, descended beyond doubt from Hindu ancestors, was dressed up in the garb of a foreign barbarian, as a breaker of temples and as an eater of beef and declared to be a military colonist in the land he had lived for about thirty of forty centuries.”

Mohammad Habib (1895–1971) Indian historian

Source: Attributed in [Nizami, K. A., w:K. A. Nizami, Politics and Society during the Early Medieval Period: Collected Works of Professor Mohammad Habib, 1974, 12]. Later quoted in [Eaton, Richard M., Temple Desecration And Indo-Muslim States, Journal of Islamic Studies, 2000, 11, 3, 283–319, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26198197, 0955-2340] Which was later quoted in [Hirst, Jacqueline Suthren, w:Jacqueline Suthren Hirst, Zavos, John, Religious Traditions in Modern South Asia, Routledge, 978-1-136-62667-8, 239, https://books.google.com/books?id=voGoAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT239, 2013] note: Attributed
Ref: en.wikiquote.org - Mohammad Habib / Attributed

Peace

“By adverting to the dignity of this high calling our ancestors have turned a savage wilderness into a glorious empire: and have made the most extensive, and the only honorable conquests, not by destroying, but by promoting the wealth, the number, the happiness of the human race.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Second Speech on Conciliation with America (1775)

Wealth , Happiness

“The land of the living was not far removed from the domain of the ancestors. There was coming and going between them, especially at festivals and also when an old man died, because an old man was very close to the ancestors. A man's life from birth to death was a series of transition rites which brought him nearer and nearer to his ancestors.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 13 (p. 115)

Life , Death , Birth

“For all the advances of modern societies, traditional tribal communities may have better served the essential needs of people for emotional support, nutrition, and exercise than does contemporary society. We don’t need to return to the ways of our ancestors, but we do need to learn from them.”

David Korten (1937) writer, sustainability advocate

People , Way , Exercises , Communication

“The root of the problem is that domesticated animals have inherited from their wild ancestors many physical, emotional and social needs that are redundant in human farms. Farmers routinely ignore these needs without paying any economic price. They lock animals in tiny cages, mutilate their horns and tails, separate mothers from offspring, and selectively breed monstrosities.”

Yuval Noah Harari (1976) Israeli historian

Introduction to Animal Liberation

Problem , Animals

“We are programmed to find sex pleasurable for one simple reason—because animals who mate have offspring. Those who do not mate have none. Traits that result in successful reproduction get reinforced and passed on. Evolution is that simple.
It is therefore useless to bemoan as evil the fact that men tend toward aggression. Among our ancestors, aggression often helped males have more offspring than their competitors. “Good” and “evil” had little to do with it.
That is, until we reached consciousness, at which point, good and evil became pertinent indeed! Behaviors which might be excusable in dumb beasts can seem perverted, criminal, when performed by thinking beings. Just because a trait is “natural” does not oblige us to keep it.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Introduction to Chapter 7 (pp. 105-106)
Glory Season (1993)

Men , Pleasure , Sex , Behavior

“Eons ago when your ancestors were defending their caves against the tiger and the mammoth, with crude spears of flint, the gold spires of my people split the stars! They are gone and forgotten, and the world is a waste of barbarians, white and black. Let me, too, pass as a dream that is forgotten in the mists of the ages…”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"The Moon of Skulls" (1930)

People , Age , World , Dreams

“NEGRO Member of a subgroup of the human race who hails, or whose ancestors hailed, from a chunk of land nicknamed—not by its residents—Africa. Superior to the Caucasian in that negroes did not invent nuclear weapons, the automobile, Christianity, nerve gas, the concentration camp, military epidemics, or the megalopolis.”

John Brunner book Stand on Zanzibar

context (6) “One Comes Out Where...”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

“Respect for his ancestors excites, in the breast of man, interest in their history, attachment to their characters, concern for their errors, involuntary pride in their virtues. Love for his posterity spurs him to exertion for their support, stimulates him to virtue for their example, and fills him with the tenderest solicitude for their welfare. Man, therefore, was not made for himself alone. No; he was made for his country, by the obligations of the social compact: he was made for his species, by the Christian duties of universal charity: he was made for all ages past, by the sentiment of reverence for his forefathers; and he was made for all future times, by the impulse of affection for his progeny. Under the influence of these principles, "Existence sees him spurn her bounded reign." They redeem his nature from the subjection of time and space: he is no longer a "puny insect shivering at a breeze;" he is the glory of creation, formed to occupy all time and all extent: bounded, during his residence upon earth, only by the boundaries of the world, and destined to life and immortality in brighter regions, when the fabric of nature itself shall dissolve and perish.”

John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) American politician, 6th president of the United States (in office from 1825 to 1829)

He here quotes statements made about William Shakespeare by Samuel Johnson, and then one made in reference to Timon by Alexander Pope in Moral Essays.
Oration at Plymouth (1802)

Love , Life , Age , World

“It seemed too easy to claim that there was nothing new under the sun, that … our spear-wielding ancestors had been as wise and good as ourselves and that the onward march of rational thought had brought with it nothing but tragedy. Did any of these arguments take into account Ariane’s profile on her way up? Did they credit the impeccable logic of her hydraulic systems? And most of all, did not such bromides merely betray the resentment of a defeated and unimaginative class? I felt my allegiances shift to the engineers and technicians around me, these new medicine men who often sported baseball caps, and had a tendency towards unsophisticated humour. What astonishing creatures they were! What extraordinary horizons they had opened up!”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

[describing his sentiments after the launch of the rocket Ariane] pp. 163-164.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009)

Men , Way , Sport , Sun

“Suppose your father… walked into this room at the ordinary human pace of walking. And suppose just behind him was his father. How long would we have to wait before the ancestor who enters the now-open door is a creature who normally walked on all fours? The answer is a week.”

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)

Waiting

“There can be little doubt that the greater size and strength of man, in comparison with woman, together with his broader shoulders, more developed muscles, rugged outline of body, his greater courage and pugnacity, are all due in chief part to inheritance from his half-human male ancestors. These characters would, however, have been preserved or even augmented during the long ages of man's savagery, by the success of the strongest and boldest men, both in the general struggle for life and in their contests for wives; a success which would have ensured their leaving a more numerous progeny than their less favoured brethren.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

second edition (1874), chapter XIX: "Secondary Sexual Characters of Man", page 563 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=586&itemID=F944&viewtype=image
The Descent of Man (1871)

Life , Men , Age , Courage

“Metaphorically speaking, free African-American politicians and activists are boiling the bones of their enslaved ancestors to make soup. The suffering of slaves is being exploited posthumously to shape discourse in politically advantageous ways.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"What Cultural Marxist Would Say About Looting, http://www.wnd.com/2017/09/what-cultural-marxists-would-say-about-looting/" WND.COM, September 14, 2017
2010s, 2017

Way , Suffering

“With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice, that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country, to one united people; a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established their general Liberty and Independence.”

John Jay Federalist Papers

1780s, The Federalist Papers, Federalist No. 2 (1787)

War , People , Pleasure , Religion

“Each and every loss becomes an instance of ultimate tragedy—something that once was, but shall never be known to us. The hump of the giant deer—as a nonfossilizable item of soft anatomy—should have fallen into the maw of erased history. But our ancestors provided a wondrous rescue, and we should rejoice mightily. Every new item can instruct us; every unexpected object possesses beauty for its own sake; every rescue from history's great shredding machine is—and I don't know how else to say this—a holy act of salvation for a bit of totality.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"A Lesson from the Old Masters", p. 195
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Beauty , History , Loss

“Now my humble fear is that this double training, in language as well as in thought, imposes somewhat too heavy a burden upon the young, especially when, at the age of three years old, they are taken from the maternal care and taught to unlearn the old language — except for the purpose of repeating it in the presence of their Mothers and Nurses — and to learn the vocabulary and idiom of science. Already methinks I discern a weakness in the grasp of mathematical truth at the present time as compared with the more robust intellect of our ancestors three hundred years ago.”

Edwin Abbott Abbott book Flatland

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART I: THIS WORLD, Chapter 12. Of the Doctrine of our Priests

Truth , Age , Fear , Mathematics

“Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.”

Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer

Time Magazine (27 March 1964).

People

“I am not for reconciliation, I am for justice. There is no reconciliation without justice and justice is the return of land. […] AfriForum is a boeremag. It’s a group of Afrikaners who still wish for apartheid. They will never see it. Afrikaner boys, die poppe sal dans. The EFF is coming for you boys. Afrikaner boys, the ANC has made you to think this thing is still Orange Free State. This thing is not Orange Free State. This is Free State. When we take over power, Afrikaner males, you will know your place. Just pray, pray to [your] ancestors, pray to Malan, pray to Verwoerd, pray and ask them for EFF not to come into power. Because [if] we come into power, Afrikaner men, this side! This is where you belong, this is how you are going to behave. They must know, these Afrikaner males, they must know, we are not scared of them ideologically, politically and otherwise. We can take each other toe to toe.”

Julius Malema (1981) South African political activist

To EFF supporters after appearing in the Bloemfontein Magistrate's Court for allegedly contravening the Riotous Assemblies Act, 14 November 2016, Watch: “When we take over power, Afrikaner males, you will know your place.” Malema [video http://www.thesouthafrican.com/watch-when-we-take-over-power-afrikaner-males-you-will-know-your-place-malema-video/], Ezra Claymore, The South African, 14 November 2016. See also: http://citizen.co.za/news/news-national/1344722/afrikaner-boys-die-poppe-sal-dans-malema/, http://sandtonchronicle.co.za/lnn/226059/afrikaner-boys-die-poppe-sal-dans-malema, http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/de-klerk-must-suffer-malema-20161114

Men , Justice , Boy , Thinking

“We are the ancestors of those gardening the universe.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

Space: What love's got to do with it - The Space Review (2004)

Universe

“[W]hat a terrible wrong inflict those nations that force their reign on minorities, depriving them of freedom without allowing them to live their lives by the tendencies they have inherited from their ancestors (…) For we can see how all the nations that ever fell, throughout the generations, came to it only due to their oppression of minorities and individuals, which had therefore rebelled against them and ruined them. Hence, it is clear to all that peace cannot exist in the world if we do not take into consideration the freedom of the individual. Without it, peace will not be sustainable and ruin shall prevail.”

Yehuda Ashlag (1886–1954) Orthodox Jewish Rabbi and Kabbalist

Assorted Themes, On Freedom

World , Peace , Freedom

“Among the vices of the Anglo-Saxons may be reckoned their propensity to gaming, and especially with the dice, which they derived from their ancestors; for Tacitus assures us that the ancient Germans could not only hazard all their wealth, but even stake their liberty, upon the turn of the dice; "and he who loses," says the author, "submits to servitude, though younger and stronger than his antagonist, and patiently permits himself to be bound, and sold in the market; and this madness they dignify by the name of honour."”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. xx
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Dice

Game , Madness , Wealth

“We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.”

Shirley Abbott (1934)

Source: Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South (1983), p. 1 (opening lines)

History , Knowledge

““I don’t understand why the sight of you should scare me so,” Joseph said. He did not sound frightened. “You don’t look that threatening. Just… very different.”
“Different is threatening to most species,” Nikanj answered. “Different is dangerous. It might kill you. That was true to your animal ancestors and your nearest animal relatives. And it’s true for you.””

Octavia E. Butler book Dawn

Part III “Nursery” chapter 12 (p. 186).
Dawn (1987)

Understanding , Animals

“…if our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people, the British empire would not have been made.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Salisbury to the Cabinet (8 March 1878), from John Vincent (ed.), The Diaries of Edward Henry Stanley, Fifteenth Earl of Derby (London: The Royal Historical Society, 1994), p. 523
1870s

People

“…nobody has told the coelancath, a fish that lives off Madagascar and looks exactly like its ancestors of 300 million years ago, that it has broken some law by not evolving.”

Matt Ridley (1958) economist

Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 2. The Enigma

Law , Fish

“When our ancestors discovered the trick of consistently producing sharp stone flakes, it constituted a major breakthrough in human prehistory. …The modest flake… is a highly effective implement for cutting through all but the toughest of hides… the humans who made and used these simple stone flakes thereby availed themselves of a new energy source—animal protein.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

The Origin of Humankind (1994)

Animals

“It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 10 “Conversations in Mishnory” (p. 143)

“…above all, I must recommend to you the Care of the Navy, the Strength and Glory of this Nation, that you will put it into such a Condition, as may make us considered and respected Abroad. I cannot express My Concern upon this Occasion more suitable to My own Thoughts of it, than by assuring you I have a true English Heart, as jealous of the Honour of the Nation as you can be. And I please Myself with the Hopes, that, by GOD'S Blessing and your Assistance, I may carry the Reputation of it yet higher in the World, than ever it has been in the Time of any of My Ancestors.”

James II of England (1633–1701) King of England, Scotland and Ireland

Speech to Parliament http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=12935 (30 May 1685).

God , World , Hope , Time

“Owen believed in common archetypes rather than a common ancestor, and his conduct presents an archetype of the modern creation scientists, except that they submit to peer review rarely, (if ever) and none of them are experts in anything. They’ve never produced any research indicative of their position. They cannot substantiate any of their assertions, and they’ve never successfully refuted anyone else’s hypotheses either. But every argument of evidence they’ve ever made in favor of creation has been refuted immediately and repeatedly. All they’ve ever been able to do was criticize real science, and even then the absolute best arguments they’ve ever come up with were all disproved in a court of law with mountains of research standing against their every allegation. Yet creationists still use those same ridiculous rationalizations because they will never accept where their beliefs are in error! Their only notable strength is how anyone can be so consistently proven to be absolutely wrong about absolutely everything, 100% of the time, for such a long time, and still make-believe theirs is the absolute truth. More amazing still is how often they will actually lie in defense of their alleged truth. Every publication promoting creation over any avenue of actual science contains misquotes, misdefinitions, and misrepresented misinformation, while their every appeal to reason is based entirely on erroneous assumptions and logical fallacies. There is a madness to their method, but it is naught but propaganda.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"12th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TkY7HrJOhc Youtube (April 19, 2008)
Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Truth , Lie , Law , Error

“Did America owe something to the slaves whose labor had been stolen? … That debt…is best discharged through memory, because the slaves are dead and their descendants…are better off as a consequence of their ancestors being hauled from Africa to America.”

Dinesh D'Souza (1961) Indian-American political commentator, filmmaker, author

Source: Books, America: Imagine a World without Her (2014), Ch. 8

Memory , Dead

“The convulsive hold which Mary to this day maintains over human imagination,— as you can see at Lourdes,— was due much less to her power of saving soul or body than to her sympathy with people who suffered under law,— divine or human,— justly or unjustly, by accident or design, by decree of God or by guile of Devil. She cared not a straw for conventional morality, and she had no notion of letting her friends be punished, to the tenth or any other generation, for the sins of their ancestors or the peccadillos of Eve.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

God , People , Law , Soul

“Mahatma Buddha has also left a deep imprint on my life. In my personal room also, there are three-four statues of the Buddha…. In Buddhism, I see dharma entrenched in karuna (compassion). I believe compassion is the most valuable essence of life. When I formed the government, these values got ingrained even deeper. What attracts me about Buddha is his inclusive philosophy; secondly, his modernity; and thirdly, his belief in the importance of Sangathan—the idea of Sangha. This underlies all his philosophy. I would often wonder how Buddha managed to reach all over the world. What was it about him that lit sparks everywhere he went, took ordinary human beings towards their kartavya (duty) and appealed to the lower status groups as well? Buddhism does not have too much tam-jham or celebration of big utsavs. There is a direct connect of the individual with the Divine. That entire thought system touches me deeply. Moreover, wherever Buddha went, the region witnessed prosperity. Even though China had a different belief system but Buddha has maintained his influence on China as well. Recently, I went to China and found that their government was introducing me to Buddhist elements of their culture with great pride. I got to know that China is making a film on Hiuen-Tsang. I took a pro-active role and wrote to those people saying that they should not forget the part about his stay in Gujarat. Hiuen-Tsang lived for a long time in the village where I was born. He has written about a hostel in that village where 1,000 student monks resided. After I became chief minister, I got the area excavated and found archeological evidence of things described by Hiuen-Tsang. This means Mahatma Buddha’s philosophy would have had some influence on my ancestors.”

Narendra Modi (1950) Prime Minister of India

Narendra Modi quoted from Kishwar, Madhu (2014). Modi, Muslims and media: Voices from Narendra Modi's Gujarat. p.388-389
2013

Life , People , World , Idea

“I want to tell you why I did this. My mother was the first one to tell me about the Statue of Liberty. She saw at first from the deck of the ship that brought her to America: she was an immigrant. She impressed upon me how precious our liberty is and how easily it can be lost. And then one day it occurred to me that I could show with magic how we take our freedom for granted. Sometimes we don't realize how important something is until it's gone. So I asked our government for permission to let me make the Statue of Liberty disappear… just for a few minutes. I thought that if we faced emptiness where, for as long as we can remember, that great lady is, lifted up our land, why then… we might imagine what the world would be like without liberty and we realize how precious our freedom really is. And then I will make the Statue of Liberty reappear, by remembering the world that made it appear in the first place. The world is freedom. Freedom is the true magic. It's beyond the power of any magician. But wherever one human being guarantees another the same rights he or she enjoys, we find freedom. [The curtain between the live audience and the Statue of Liberty used to hide the secret of its disappearance is raised] How long can we stay free? But just as long as we keep thinking, and speaking, and acting as free human beings. Our ancestors just couldn’t. We can. And I will show you the way. Nooooow!”

David Copperfield (1956) American illusionist

The curtain is lowered and the Statue of Liberty reappears
From "The Magic of David Copperfield V: The Statue of Liberty Disappears" (April 8th, 1983)

Secret , World , Way , Imagination

“This textbook says "All the many forms of life on Earth today are descended from a common ancestor." What? You mean the birds and the bananas have a common ancestor?!”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

100 Reasons Evolution is So Stupid! (2001)

Life , Bird

“The Church attempted to regulate this rather violent society, and eventually a code of honor evolved known as the code of chivalry. (…) Those who aspired to be knights had to have aristocratic ancestors and wealth enough to own warhorses and armor and to provide for a team of supporters.”

Marilyn Stokstad (1929–2016) art historian

Overview: Castles in Context
Medieval castles (2005)

Support , Wealth

“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 (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

Source: The Story of My Life (1932), Ch. 1 "Before The Beginning"

Life

“Most of our ancestors were not perfect ladies and gentlemen. The majority of them weren't even mammals.”

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath

Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977), p. 84

Perfection

“Now they [the Powers] have started the aggression, and the extinction of our nation is imminent. If we just fold our arms and yield to them, I would have no face to see our ancestors after death. If we must perish, why not fight to the death?”

Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908) Chinese empress

[The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China, Keith Laidler, 2003, John Wiley & Sons, 221, http://books.google.com/books?id=QLPZ7294oSIC&pg=PA221&dq=have+started+the+aggression,+and+the+extinction+of+our+nation+is+imminent++no+face+ancestors+death&hl=en&sa=X&ei=oGsLT5rpEqHu0gGY29nuBQ&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=have%20started%20the%20aggression%2C%20and%20the%20extinction%20of%20our%20nation%20is%20imminent%20%20no%20face%20ancestors%20death&f=false, 1-9-2011, 0470864265, the courage and fighting spirit were at once evident: 'Now they have started the aggression,' she declared, 'and the extinction of our nation is imminent. If we just fold our arms and yield to them, I would have no face to see our ancestors after death. If we must perish, why not fight to the death?'2]
[Massacre in Shansi, Nat Brandt, 1994, illustrated, Syracuse University Press, 181, http://books.google.com/books?id=R0GGv-Dio1MC&pg=PA181&dq=have+started+the+aggression,+and+the+extinction+of+our+nation+is+imminent++no+face+ancestors+death&hl=en&sa=X&ei=oGsLT5rpEqHu0gGY29nuBQ&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=have%20started%20the%20aggression%2C%20and%20the%20extinction%20of%20our%20nation%20is%20imminent%20%20no%20face%20ancestors%20death&f=false, 1-9-2011, 0815602820, Tz'u Hsi was enraged: "Now the Powers have started the aggression, and the extinction of our nation is imminent. If we just fold our arms and yield to them, I would have no face to see our ancestors after death. If we must perish, why not fight to the death."' The Peking Field Force — made up of five armies — was ordered to surround the legations supposedly to protect the diplomats but effectively sealing them off from the rest of the city.]
[The Boxer Rebellion, Richard O'Connor, 1973, illustrated, reprint, Hale, 85, http://books.google.com/books?ei=oGsLT5rpEqHu0gGY29nuBQ&id=LYVxAAAAMAAJ&dq=have+started+the+aggression%2C+and+the+extinction+of+our+nation+is+imminent++no+face+ancestors+death&q=extinction+ancestors, 1-9-2011, 0709147805, 3. All military operations were to be controlled by the foreign ministers. . . As she listened, her majesty's face was congested with rage. . . .With firm and vehement emphasis she then told the Grand Council: "Now they have started the aggression, and the extinction of our nation is imminent. If we just fold our arms and yield to them, I would have no face to see our ancestors after death. If we must perish, why not fight to the death?]
[The spirit soldiers: a historical narrative of the Boxer Rebellion, Richard O'Connor, 1973, illustrated, Putnam, 85, http://books.google.com/books?ei=oGsLT5rpEqHu0gGY29nuBQ&id=P4NxAAAAMAAJ&dq=have+started+the+aggression%2C+and+the+extinction+of+our+nation+is+imminent++no+face+ancestors+death&q=extinction+imminent, 1-9-2011, 3. All military operations were to be controlled by the foreign . . .Council: "Now they have started the aggression, and the extinction of our nation is imminent. If we just fold our arms and yield to them, I would have no face to see our ancestors after death. If we must perish, why not fight to the death? She then elaborated on the great benefits the Manchu dynasty had conferred upon China and predicted that the grateful Chinese]
[The Siege at Peking: The Boxer Rebellion, Peter Fleming, 1990, illustrated, Dorset Press, 97, http://books.google.com/books?id=pHrZAAAAMAAJ&q=have+started+the+aggression,+and+the+extinction+of+our+nation+is+imminent++no+face+ancestors+death&dq=have+started+the+aggression,+and+the+extinction+of+our+nation+is+imminent++no+face+ancestors+death&hl=en&sa=X&ei=oGsLT5rpEqHu0gGY29nuBQ&ved=0CEcQ6AEwBA, 1-9-2011, 0880294620, 'Now,' she is reported to have exclaimed, 'the Powers have started the aggression, and the extinction of our nation is imminent. If we just fold our arms and yield to them, I would have no face to see our ancestors after death.]
[The Siege at Peking, Peter Fleming, 1959, NEW YORK 49 East 33rd Street, New York 16, N.Y, HARPER & BROTHERS, 97, 1-9-2011, The Empress Dowager reacted in the way that the authors of the document presumably hoped she would. 'Now,' she is reported to have exclaimed, 'the Powers have started the aggression, and the extinction of our nation is imminent. If we just fold our arms and yield to them, I would have no face to see our ancestors after death. If we must perish, why not fight to the death?' A Decree (which was widely ignored) went out to the provinces ordering them to send troops to Peking.]
[The Boxer catastrophe, Issue 583 of Columbia studies in the social sciences, Chester C. Tan, 1967, reprint, Octagon Books, 73, http://books.google.com/books?ei=oGsLT5rpEqHu0gGY29nuBQ&id=_gcOAQAAMAAJ&dq=have+started+the+aggression%2C+and+the+extinction+of+our+nation+is+imminent++no+face+ancestors+death&q=extinction+nation, 1-9-2011, 0374977526, affairs to be committed to their hands. The fourth point was not mentioned. She then made the following statement: " Now they [the Powers] have started the aggression, and the extinction of our nation is imminent. If we just fold our arms and yield to them, I would have no face to see our ancestors after death. If]
[Columbia studies in the social sciences, Volume 583, Columbia University. Faculty of Political Science, 1955, Columbia University Press, 73, http://books.google.com/books?ei=oGsLT5rpEqHu0gGY29nuBQ&id=ZfocAQAAMAAJ&dq=have+started+the+aggression%2C+and+the+extinction+of+our+nation+is+imminent++no+face+ancestors+death&q=extinction+nation, 1-9-2011, metnioned. She then made the following statement: " Now they [the Powers] have started the aggression, and the extinction of our nation is imminent. If we just fold our arms and yield to them, I would have no face to see our ancestors after death. If we must perish, why not fight to the death? " Finally Hsü Yung-i,]
[The rhetoric of empire: American China policy, 1895-1901, Volume 36 of Harvard East Asian series, Marilyn Blatt Young, 1969, Harvard University Press, 147, http://books.google.com/books?ei=oGsLT5rpEqHu0gGY29nuBQ&id=tUlCAAAAIAAJ&dq=have+started+the+aggression%2C+and+the+extinction+of+our+nation+is+imminent++no+face+ancestors+death&q=extinction+imminent, 1-9-2011, a surrender of sovereignty: (1) a special place to be assigned to the emperor for residence; (2) all revenues to be collected by the foreign ministers; (3) all mmilitary affairs to be committed to their hands. . .After reading them out the empress dowager declare, "Now they [the powers] have started the aggression, and the extinction of our nation is imminent. If we just fold our arms and yield to them, I would have no face to see our ancestors after death. If we must perish, why not fight to the death?]
[The dragon empress: life and times of Tz'u-hsi, 1835-1908, Empress dowager of China, Marina Warner, 1974, illustrated, reprint, Cardinal, 227, http://books.google.com/books?ei=oGsLT5rpEqHu0gGY29nuBQ&id=hTend7Ttp9UC&dq=have+started+the+aggression%2C+and+the+extinction+of+our+nation+is+imminent++no+face+ancestors+death&q=extinction+imminent, 1-9-2011, 0351186573, 'Now,' she cried, 'now they have started the aggression and the extinction of our nation is imminent. If we must fold our arms and yield to them, I would have no face to see our ancestors after death.'18 Quoting]
[Symbolic war: the Chinese use of force, 1840-1980, Volume 43 of Institute of International Relations English monograph series, Jonathan R. Adelman, Zhiyu Shi, 1993, Institute of International Relations, National Chengchi University, 132, http://books.google.com/books?ei=oGsLT5rpEqHu0gGY29nuBQ&id=ZYm6AAAAIAAJ&dq=have+started+the+aggression%2C+and+the+extinction+of+our+nation+is+imminent++no+face+ancestors+death&q=aggression+extinction+imminent, 1-9-2011, 9579368236, Council issued a decree recruiting Boxers to the army, attacking the advance of Seymour, pacifying the Boxers and ordering local troops to march northward to protect the capital. The next day the Empress Dowager declared that, "Now they have started the aggression and the extinction of our nation is imminent. If we just fold our arms and yield to them, I would have no face to see our ancestors after death."44 In the words of the imperial decree]

Death , Fight

“Buddhas and Ancestors continuously maintain ocean mudra samadhi. While swimming in this samadhi, they expound, realize, practice.”

Dogen (1200–1253) Japanese Zen buddhist teacher

Ocean Mudra Samadhi (1242)

“No age can have everthing and in material ways ours is more fortunate than any preceding one. Our ancestors appear to have mastered the art of living better than we are able to when an easy conscience, largely due to the unshaken faith of the time, left a marging of spiritual energy with which to enjoy life.”

Flora Thompson (1876–1947) English author and poet

May Chapter The Peverel Papers - A yearbook of the countryside ed Julian Shuckburgh Century Hutchinson 1986
The Peverel Papers

Life , Age , Faith , Art

“With a choked cry the Englishman woke from his trance of horror, drew and fired at a darting flame-eyed shadow which fell at his feet with a shattered skull. And Kane gave tongue to one deep, fierce roar and bounded into the melee, all the berserk fury of his heathen Saxon ancestors bursting into terrible being.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"Wings in the Night" (1932)

Cry

“The real menace, the disease eating away at the heart of Western society, is white ethnomasochism: hatred of one’s own type, one’s own race, one’s own ancestors, one’s own parents, one’s own fellow citizens who do not share a bizarrely unreal and idealistic view of human nature.”

John Derbyshire (1945) writer

After the Atrocity In Nice http://www.unz.com/jderbyshire/after-the-atrocity-in-nice/, The Unz Review, July 17, 2016.

Disease , Nature , Parent , Heart

“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.”

Bill Clinton (1946) 42nd President of the United States

State of the Union Address http://clinton4.nara.gov/WH/New/html/19990119-2656.html (January 19, 1999)
1990s

Angels , Way

“Tomas stopped and looked at the three Oankali. “Do you believe in spirits?”
“We believe in life,” Ahajas said.
“Life after death?”
Ahajas smoothed her tentacles briefly in agreement. “When I’m dead,” she said, “I will nourish other life.”
“But I mean—”
“If I died on a lifeless world, a world that could sustain some form of life if it were tenacious enough, organelles within each cell of my body would survive and evolve. In perhaps a thousand million years, that world would be as full of life as this one.”
“…it would?”
“Yes. Our ancestors have seeded a great many barren worlds that way. Nothing is more tenacious than the life we are made of. A world of life from apparent death, from dissolution. That’s what we believe in.”
“Nothing more?””

Octavia E. Butler book Imago

Ahajas became smooth enough with amusement to reflect firelight. “No, Lelka. Nothing more.”
Source: Imago (1989), Chapter II, “Exile” section 12 (pp. 662-663)

Life , Death , World , Way

“People have been making love and having sex in space over the thousands of years that our ancestors lived and traveled in small hunting-and-gathering bands. Earth is in Space.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

Source: Zero Gravity interview (2006), p. 90

Love , People , Making love , Sex

“Now, you might think that when the old majority becomes a minority, it would then get minority rights. But that’s not how it works. Whites can’t become a certified minority; they will always be the legacy majority. The closer we get to the future when whites are a minority, the more we hear about their ancestors’ sins, their ineradicable hereditary guilt, their corruption of blood.”

Steve Sailer (1958) American journalist and movie critic

The Ultimate Minority Right http://takimag.com/article/the_ultimate_minority_right_steve_sailer/print#axzz4A9Spob5l, Taki's Magazine, February 10, 2016

Thinking , Future

“We are not primitive. We live differently to you, but we do not live exactly like our grandparents did, nor do you. Were your ancestors 'primitive'? I don't think so. We respect our ancestors. We love our children. This is the same for all people.”

Roy Sesana (1950) Botswana activist

Source: Acceptance Speech for The Right Livelihood Award http://www.rightlivelihood.org/fpk_sesana_speech.html

Love , Children , People , Thinking

“My uncle [mother’s brother] wrote rather twee books of memoirs in the period between the two World Wars. They’d be deeply embarrassing to read today. In the 19th century my mother’s family were involved with the Pre-Raphaelites, and a direct ancestor of mine was Lady Byron’s lawyer, who advised her to leave the poet because of her husband’s affair with his half-sister. A much earlier ancestor on my mother’s side was chaplain to Richard Corbet, Bishop of Oxford, who wrote the poem ‘Farewell Rewards and Fairies’. In his ‘Brief Lives’ Aubrey describes them getting drunk together in the cellars of Christchurch, Oxford.”

Edward Lucie-Smith (1933) British art critic, writer and curator

From an interview http://rimbaud.org.uk/q-lucie-smith.html

War , Books , World , Family

“If we are to be the last of the white men who conquered the world; if we are finally to be overwhelmed by a pack of rats, let us at least face the death of our race as our ancestors faced their death---like MEN. Let us not crawl down amongst the rats begging for mercy or trying to out-sneak them and pretend to be rats ourselves!”

George Lincoln Rockwell (1918–1967) American politician, founder of the American Nazi Party

In Hoc Signo Vinces
1960, In Hoc Signo Vinces

Death , Men , World

“The more that we learn about these animals the more we find that there is basically no difference between birds and their closely related dinosaur ancestors like velociraptor. Both have wishbones, brooded their nests, possess hollow bones, and were covered in feathers. If animals like velociraptor were alive today our first impression would be that they were just very unusual looking birds.”

Mark Norell (1957) American paleontologist

As quoted in American Museum of Natural History "Velociraptor had feathers" ScienceDaily (September 20, 2007)

Bird , Learning , Animals

“We are apt to form romantic and exaggerated notions about the moral innocence of our ancestors. Ages of ignorance and simplicity are thought to be ages of purity. The direct contrary, I believe, is the case…In the middle ages, not only the most flagrant violations of modesty were frequently practised and permitted, but the most infamous vices. Men are less ashamed as they are less polished.”

Thomas Warton book The History of English Poetry

The History of English Poetry (1774-81) vol. 1, p. 431.

Men , Age

“Dogs and cats came from a common ancestor, can you explain that?… Can you explain it now, what animal you're talking about that dogs and cats came from… It was arboreal?… What do you mean by 'arboreal?”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

AronRa vs Ray Comfort (September 17th, 2012), Radio Paul's Radio Rants

Dogs , Cats , Animals

“It may be relevant here to recall gratefully a fraternal correction I was kindly offered by the Archimandrite Ambrosius of the Greek Orthodox Church. After listening to a lecture I delivered at Oxford University some years ago, he gently chided me (in private, not in public) for not perceiving the difference between the brand of Hellenism affecting Western theology that had absorbed the philosophical thought of ancient Greece, and the Hellenism of Eastern Orthodox theology which had assimilated the spiritual praxis of their non-Christian ancestors. Mulling over this critical observation of his, I came to understand why our scholastic tradition has not given importance to what Greek Orthodox spirituality has named nepsis (vigilance), which is its own technical term for mindfulness.”

Aloysius Pieris (1934) Sri Lankan Jesuit priest

Source: "Spirituality as Mindfulness: Biblical and Buddhist Approaches", p. 39

Understanding , Universe

“There iz no alternativ. Every possible reezon that could ever be offered for altering the spelling of wurds, stil exists in full force; and if a gradual reform should not be made in our language, it wil proov that we are less under the influence of reezon than our ancestors.”

Noah Webster (1758–1843) lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English-language spelling reformer, writer, editor and author

Preface to A Collection of Essays and Fugitiv Writings (1790) http://books.google.com/books?vid=0q9zW406vxSXI6op5n8&id=pcIgAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=%22Fugitiv+Writings%22#PPR11,M1
This quote illustrates the reformed spelling advocated by Webster.

Quotes about ancestor page 2

Quotes about ancestor
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