Quotes about heir (132 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“36. Do you wish to pray? Renounce all things. You then will become heir to all.”

Evagrius Ponticus (345–399) Christian monk

Chapters on Prayer

“Nor shall this peace sleep with her; but as when
The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,
Her ashes new-create another heir
As great in admiration as herself.”

William Shakespeare Henry VIII

Source: Henry VIII

Peace , Bird , Sleep

“He therefore again asked, what was the name of that nation? and was answered, that they were called Angles. "Right", said he, for they have an Angelic face, and it becomes such to be co-heirs with the Angels in heaven. What is the name", proceeded he, "of the province from which they are brought?" It was replied, that the natives of that province were called Deiri. "Truly are they De ira", said he, "withdrawn from wrath, and called to the mercy of Christ. How is the king of that province called?" They told him his name was Ælla: and he, alluding to the name said, "Hallelujah, the praise of God the Creator must be sung in those parts."”
Rursus ergo interrogavit quod esset vocabulum gentis illius. Responsum est quod Angli vocarentur. At ille: "Bene", inquit, "nam et angelicam habent faciem et tales angelorum in caelis decet esse cohaeredes. Quod habet nomen ipsa provincia, de qua isti sunt adlati?" Responsum est quod Deiri vocarentur idem provinciales. At ille: "Bene", inquit, "Deiri; de ira eruti, et ad misericordiam Christi vocati. Rex provinciae illius quomodo apellatur?" Responsum est quod Aelli diceretur. At ille adludens ad nomen ait: "Alleluia, laudem Dei creatoris illis in partibus oportet cantari".

Bede book Ecclesiastical History of the English People

Rursus ergo interrogavit quod esset vocabulum gentis illius. Responsum est quod Angli vocarentur. At ille: "Bene", inquit, "nam et angelicam habent faciem et tales angelorum in caelis decet esse cohaeredes. Quod habet nomen ipsa provincia, de qua isti sunt adlati?" Responsum est quod Deiri vocarentur idem provinciales. At ille: "Bene", inquit, "Deiri; de ira eruti, et ad misericordiam Christi vocati. Rex provinciae illius quomodo apellatur?"
Responsum est quod Aelli diceretur. At ille adludens ad nomen ait: "Alleluia, laudem Dei creatoris illis in partibus oportet cantari".
Book II, chapter 1
Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People)

God , Angels , Christ , Parting

“The monarchy of the Greeks for want of an heir was broken into several kingdoms; four of which, seated to the four winds of heaven, were very eminent. For Ptolemy reigned over Egypt, Lybia and Ethiopia; Antigonus over Syria and the lesser Asia; Lysimachus over Thrace; and Cassander over Macedon, Greece and Epirus.”

Isaac Newton (1643–1727) British physicist and mathematician and founder of modern classical physics

Vol. I, Ch. 12: Of the Prophecy of the Scripture of Truth
Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John (1733)

“Christianity has functioned for the normative self-understanding of modernity as more than a mere precursor or a catalyst. Egalitarian universalism, from which sprang the ideas of freedom and social solidarity, of an antonomous conduct of life and emancipation, of the individual morality of conscience, human rights, and democracy, is the direct heir to the judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there is no alternative to it. And in the light of the current challenges of a postnational constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk.”

Jürgen Habermas (1929) German sociologist and philosopher

Habermas (2006) "Conversation about God and the World." Time of transitions. Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 150-151.

Love , Life , Justice , Democracy

“Of the complete biological inferiority of the negro there can be no question—he has anatomical features consistently varying from those of other stocks, & always in the direction of the lower primates... Equally inferior—& perhaps even more so—is the Australian black stock, which differs widely from the real negro... In dealing with these two black races, there is only one sound attitude for any other race (be it white, Indian, Malay, Polynesian, or Mongolian) to take—& that is to prevent admixture as completely & determinedly as it can be prevented, through the establishment of a colour-line & the rigid forcing of all mixed offspring below that line. I am in accord with the most vehement & vociferous Alabaman or Mississippian on that point … Other racial questions are wholly different in nature—involving wide variations unconnected with superiority or inferiority. Only an ignorant dolt would attempt to call a Chinese gentleman—heir to one of the greatest artistic & philosophic traditions in the world—an "inferior" of any sort... & yet there are potent reasons, based on wide physical, mental, & cultural differences, why great numbers of the Chinese ought not to mix into the Caucasian fabric, or vice versa. It is not that one race is any better than any other, but that their whole respective heritages are so antipodal as to make harmonious adjustment impossible. Members of one race can fit into another only through the complete eradication of their own background-influences—& even then the adjustment will always remain uneasy & imperfect if the newcomer's physical aspect froms a constant reminder of his outside origin. Therefore it is wise to discourage all mixtures of sharply differentiated races—though the color-line does not need to be drawn as strictly as in the case of the negro, since we know that a dash or two of Mongolian or Indian or Hindoo or some such blood will not actually injure a white stock biologically.... As a matter of fact, most of the psychological race-differences which strike us so prominently are cultural rather than biological. If one could take a Japanese infant, alter his features to the Anglo-Saxon type through plastic surgery, & place him with an American family in Boston for rearing—without telling him that he is not an American—the chances are that in 20 years the result would be a typical American youth with very few instincts to distinguish him from his pure Nordic college-mates. The same is true of other superior alien races including the Jew—although the Nazis persist in acting on a false biological conception. If they were wise in their campaign to get rid of Jewish cultural influences (& a great deal can be said for such a campaign, when the dominance of the Aryan tradition is threatened as in Germany & New York City), they would not emphasize the separatism of the Jew but would strive to make him give up his separate culture & lose himself in the German people. It wouldn't hurt Germany—or alter its essential physical type—to take in all the Jews it now has.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

However, that wouldn't work in Poland or New York City, where the Jews are of an inferior strain, & so numerous that they would essentially modify the physical type.
Letter to Natalie H. Wooley (22 November 1934), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 77
Non-Fiction, Letters

People , Youth , World , Family

“We all bear traces of the starvation struggle which for so long made up the life of the race. Our very organism holds memories and glimpses of that long life of our ancestors which still goes on among so many of our contemporaries. Nothing so deadens the sympathies and shrivels the power of enjoyment as the persistent keeping away from the great opportunities for helpfulness and a continual ignoring of the starvation struggle which makes up the life of at least half the race. To shut one’s self away from that half of the race life is to shut one’s self away from the most vital part of it; it is to live out but half the humanity to which we have been born heir.”

Jane Addams (1860–1935) pioneer settlement social worker

Source: Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), Ch. 6

Life , Memory , Help , Parting

“There will always be voices who say that what happens in the wider world is not our concern, nor our responsibility. But we must never forget that we are heirs to a struggle for freedom. Our democracy, our individual opportunity only exists because those who came before us had the wisdom and the courage to recognize that our ideals will only endure if we see our self-interest in the success of other peoples and other nations.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2014, Address to European Youth (March 2014)

Wisdom , People , World , Democracy

“All men are made in the image of God. All men are brothers. All men are created equal. Every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth. Every man has rights that are neither conferred by, nor derived from the State — they are God-given. Out of one blood, God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth. What a marvelous foundation for any home!”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam (1967)
Context: We are presently moving down a dead-end road that can lead to national disaster. America has strayed to the far country of racism and militarism. The home that all too many Americans left was solidly structured idealistically; its pillars were solidly grounded in the insights of our Judeo-Christian heritage. All men are made in the image of God. All men are brothers. All men are created equal. Every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth. Every man has rights that are neither conferred by, nor derived from the State — they are God-given. Out of one blood, God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth. What a marvelous foundation for any home! What a glorious and healthy place to inhabit. But America's strayed away, and this unnatural excursion has brought only confusion and bewilderment. It has left hearts aching with guilt and minds distorted with irrationality.

Men , God , Home

“Suitcases full of banknotes were said to be routinely taken to the Prime Minister’s house. Former Syndicate member S. K. Patil is reported to have said that Mrs Gandhi did not even return the suitcases... The Prime Minister is unlikely to have paid close attention to the dubious origins of some of the funds which went into Congress’s coffers. That was a matter which she left largely to her principal fundraiser, Lalit Narayan Mishra, who – though she doubtless did not realize it – also accepted Soviet money. On at least one occasion a secret gift of 2 million rupees from the Politburo to Congress (R) was personally delivered after midnight by the head of Line PR in New Delhi, Leonid Shebarshin. Another million rupees were given on the same occasion to a newspaper which supported Mrs Gandhi. Short and obese with several chins, Mishra looked the part of the corrupt politician he increasingly became. Indira Gandhi, despite her own frugal lifestyle, depended on the money he collected from a variety of sources to finance Congress (R). So did her son and anointed heir, Sanjay, whose misguided ambition to build an Indian popular car and become India’s Henry Ford depended on government favours.”

Indíra Gándhí (1917–1984) Indian politician and Prime Minister

The Mitrokhin Archive

Money , Housing , Dependency , Support

“What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,
The labor of an age in pilèd stones,
Or that his hallowed relics should be hid
Under a star-y-pointing pyramid?
Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,
What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name?”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

On Shakespeare (1630)
Source: The Complete Poetry

Age , Star , Memory

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a married man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of an heir.”

Julia Quinn (1970) American novelist

Source: The Duke and I

Truth , Universe

“When at last we are sure
You’ve been properly pilled,
Then a few paper forms
Must be properly filled
So that you and your heirs
May be properly billed.”

Dr. Seuss Horton Hears a Who!

You're Only Old Once! : A Book for Obsolete Children (1986)
Source: Horton Hears a Who!

“One of us might be assassinated and then my heir will be king. Don't give up hope just because chances are slim."
"For the assassination or the heir, your majesty?”

Megan Whalen Turner The King of Attolia

Source: The King of Attolia

Hope , Chance

“Cinema returns us to anima, religion of matter, which gives each thing its special divinity and sees gods in all things and beings. Cinema, heir of alchemy, last of an erotic science.”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

The Lords and the New Creatures: Poems (1969), The Lords: Notes on Vision

God , Religion , Science

“[R]adical Islam is heir, above all, to Nazism. The destruction of the World Trade Center was meant not only to wreak terror. Like the smashing of the Bamiyan Buddhas, it was meant to obliterate greatness and beauty, elegance and grace. These artifacts represented civilization embodied in stone or steel. They had to be destroyed. This worship of death and destruction is a nihilism of a ferocity unlike any since the Nazis burned books, then art, then whole peoples. Goebbels would have marvelled at the recruitment tape for al Qaeda, a two-hour orgy of blood and death: image after image of brutalized Muslims shown in various poses of victimization, followed by glorious images of desecration of the infidel-mutilated American soldiers in Somalia, the destruction of the USS Cole, mangled bodies at the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

2000s, 2001, The Enemy is not Islam. It is Nihilism (2001)

Death , People , Books , World

“And you can't part a boy from his father,
You can't part a boy from his dad,
You can't part a Scotchman from money
No matter how many he's had.
You can't part the skin of a sausage
Or a dad from his fond son and heir,
And you can't part the hair on a bald-headed man
For there'll be no parting there.”

Billy Bennett (1887–1942) British comedian

"Daddy", line 33

Money , Boy , Parting

“Antipater, now undisputed heir, had called down on his head the utter loathing of the nation, for everyone knew that all the slanders directed against his brothers had originated with him.”

Flavius Josephus (37–100) first-century Romano-Jewish scholar, historian and hagiographer

Chap. 5, opening, trans. G. A. Williamson
The Jewish War (c. 75 CE)

“It is richt facil and eith gait, I the tell,
Forto discend and pas on down to hell:
The blak gettis of Pluto, and that dirk way,
Standis evir oppin and patent nycht and day;
Bot tharfra to return agane on hyght,
And heir abufe recovir this aris licht,
That is difficil wark, thar lawbour lyis.”

Gavin Douglas (1474–1522) Scottish Churchman, Scholar, Poet

Bk. 6, line 265.
Eneados

Way , Hell

“It is this book ['The Imitation of Christ'] that has helped me lead my life which such serenity and has always left me with a contended heart. I has taught me that men should not puff themselves up with pride, whether they are emperors, adding this or that province tot heir empires, or painters who gain a reputation.”

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) French landscape painter and printmaker in etching

Quote, recorded by Madame Aviat; as cited in Corot, Gary Tinterow, Michael Pantazzi, Vincent Pomarède - Galeries nationales du Grand Palais (France), National Gallery of Canada, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.), 1996, p. 272-73 – quote 69
1860s

Life , Men , Books , Help

“These years of Kunti’s life were comparatively peaceful. Hardly had Kunti heaved a sigh of relief when fresh troubles arose. Though the Pandavas were received as princes, they were not acknowledged as sole heirs to the throne. Dhritarashtra continued to rule though uncrowned and quarrels broke out among the cousins. Kunti’s Bhima, a hefty fellow, delighted in frightening his cousins. Apparently they in their turn tried to poison him. Kunti’s children proved themselves to be quick in learning the art.”

Kunti character from Indian epic Mahabharata

Source: The End Of An Epoch, p. 33.

Life , Children , Peace , Art

“The church insists that we must be “born again” and that all who are not the subjects of this second birth are heirs of everlasting fire. Would it not have been much better to have made another Adam and Eve? Would it not have been better to change Noah and his people, so that after that a second birth would not have been necessary? Why not purify the fountain of all human life? Why allow the earth to be peopled with depraved and monstrous beings, each one of whom must be re-made, re-formed, and born again?”

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

Orthodoxy (1884)

Life , People , Birth , Change

“Creation's heir, the world, the world is mine!”

Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774) Irish physician and writer

Source: The Traveller (1764), Line 50.

World

“Philosophy … finds itself to be no longer anything but the heir to a fabulous mystical theology, but missing a God and wiping the slate clean.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Source: L’Expérience Intérieure (1943), p. 9

God

“In each case, the concept of chosenness played a central role. For Greeks and Armenians, the myth of ethnic election was both direct and transmitted. It was an act of God who had singled out a special community of His faithful to live according to His holy laws and receive His special blessings, the blessings being conditional on the holding of correct beliefs and the performance of sacred obligations. As with the Jews, the overriding purpose was to become a holy people beloved of God, a people of priests worthy of the status and location which God had bestowed on the community. But, unlike the Jews, Armenians and Greeks saw their election as a reward for receiving the true faith rejected by the Jews. They were therefore required to supplant the Jews as the chosen people, and become the heirs of a people who had fallen from grace. In this sense, the chosen status of Greeks and Armenians was a legacy from the Jewish people, and only much later did the Orthodox community of true believers become imbued with Greek culture and a sense of Greek-speaking community, and to the outside world Orthodoxy became synonymous with Greek culture and origins.”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Source: Myths and Memories of the Nation (1999), Chapter: Greeks, Armenians and Jews.

God , People , World , Faith

“Greatness of name in the father oft-times overwhelms the son; they stand too near one another. The shadow kills the growth: so much, that we see the grandchild come more and oftener to be heir of the first.”

Ben Jonson (1572–1637) English writer

The Works of Ben Jonson, Second Folio (1640), Timber: or Discoveries

Time

“Society is not the criminal but the force which keeps crime in check. When social controls weaken, man’s innate cruelty bursts forth. The rapist is created not by bad social conditioning influences but by a failure of social conditioning. Feminists, seeking to drive power relations out of sex, have set themselves against nature. In western culture, there are no nonexploitative relationships. Everyone has killed in order to live. Nature’s universal law of creation from destruction operates in mind as in matter. As Freud, Nietzsche’s heir, asserts, identity is conflict. Each generation drives its plow over the bones of the dead.</b”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 2

Law , Sex , Failure , Nature

“If faith, then new birth; if new birth, then sonship; if sonship, then "an heir of God, and a joint-heir with Christ." But if you have not got your foot upon the lowest round of the ladder, you will never come within sight of the blessed face of Him who stands at the top of it, and who looks down to you at this moment, saying to you, "My child, wilt thou not at this time cry unto me, 'Abba, Father?'"”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 228.

God , Faith , Birth , Time

“You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world.”

Thomas Traherne (1636–1674) English poet

First Century, sect. 29.
Centuries of Meditations

World , Star , Sea , Clothes

“The young are really the heirs to a generation of incompetence.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970)

“The SNP's commitment to a Bill of Rights and written constitution means that we will outlaw any discrimination but we also have to eradicate it from the dark recesses of the Scottish psyche. We also have to speak out against institutionalised discrimination. For example, it is a scandal of some considerable proportions that no Catholic can sit on the throne, or marry the heir to the throne -- an attitude entrenched in law that belongs to the archaic arrangements of the eighteenth century, not the bright prospects of the twenty-first.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Speech http://www.heraldscotland.com/sport/spl/aberdeen/major-s-contradiction-on-constitutional-reform-questioned-by-snp-leader-salmond-calls-for-same-say-for-scotland-1.669219 in Northern Ireland (27 July 1995).

Law

“Tenderness emerges from the fact that the two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we are all heir because we are individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, is not of two isolated selves but a union.”

Rollo May book Love and Will

Source: Love and Will (1969), p. 313

Personality

“Lower forms merge into higher forms, one species with another, the vegetable into the animal kingdom; in human history one epoch slides into another…Socialism, the stage which follows Liberalism, retains everything of value in Liberalism by virtue of its being the hereditary heir of Liberalism.”

Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937) British statesman; prime minister of the United Kingdom

Socialism and Society (1905), pp. 164-165
1900s

History , Animals

“If history has a lesson, it is that the "winner take all" attitude deprives one of the pleasures of being the heir to the best of different traditions, even while avoiding their intolerance against each other.”

László Tisza (1907–2009) Hungarian physicist

as reported by [Magdolna Hargittai, Candid science IV: conversations with famous physicists, Imperial College Press, 2004, 1860944167, 402]

Pleasure , History

“The materialists of the nineteenth century and their Marxist heirs of the twentieth, tried to tell us that, as science gives us more knowledge about the creation, we could live without faith in a Creator. Yet so far, with every new answer, we have discovered new questions. The better we understand... the master plan for the galaxies, the more reason we have found to marvel at the wonder of God’s creation.”

Wernher von Braun (1912–1977) German, later an American, aerospace engineer and space architect

As quoted in "Basis for an Assured Faith", in The Watchtower magazine (15 June 1981)

God , Faith , Understanding , Question

“Now we have lit a candle to the power
Of atoms; now we know we're heirs of light
Itself…”

Philip José Farmer (1918–2009) American science fiction writer

Sestina of the Space Rocket (1953)

Light

“Ye are born, all of you, to a royal birthright. Scorn not the poor, thou wealthy — his toil is nobler than thy luxury. Fret not at the rich, thou poor — his beneficence is comelier than thy murmuring. Join hands, both of you, rich and poor together, as ye toil in the brotherhood of God's great harvest-field — heirs of a double heritage — thou poor, of thy kingly labor — thou rich, of thy queenly charity — and let heaven bear witness to the bridal.”

William Morley Punshon (1824–1881) English Nonconformist minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 111.

God

“I that in heill wes and gladness,
Am trublit now with gret seiknes,
And feblit with infermité;
Timor mortis conturbat me.

Our plesance heir is all vane glory,
This fals warld is bot transitory,
The flesche is brukle, the Fend is sle;
Timor mortis conturbat me.”

William Dunbar (1460–1520) Poet and civil servant

"The Lament for the Makars", line 1.

“It was Stalin, Lenin’s unnatural heir, who ‘in the early 1930s…injected the adrenalin of Russian nationalism into the Soviet political bloodstream’ in an effort to restore some vitality to what gave every appearance of a failed revolution.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time, (1999), p. 176

Effort , Appearance

Sher Shah Suri (1486–1545) founder of Sur Empire in Northern India

Tarikh-i-Daudi of ‘Abdullah in Elliot and Dowson's History of India as told by its own Historians, Volume IV, pp. 478-79. Quoted in S.R.Goel, The Calcutta Quran Petition

Life , Death , Angels , Personality

“Christian theology was a revised version of Greek philosophy and the effort Plato and his heirs made to discern the permanent behind the sensible, the Ideal and the Real behind the world of individual things — ever in flux, becoming and decaying and never, ever reliably and completely True.”

William H. McNeill (1917–2016) Canadian historian

Discrepancies among the Social Sciences (1981)

World , Effort

“And now because you are His child, live as a child of God; be redeemed from the life of evil, which is false to your nature, into the life of goodness, which is the truth of your being. Scorn all that is mean; hate all that is false; struggle with all that is impure Live the simple, lofty life which befits an heir of immortality.”

Frederick William Robertson (1816–1853) British writer and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 314.

Life , God , Hate , Truth

“The only loyalty to enlightenment consists in disloyalty. This can be partly understood from the position of its heirs, who look back on the “heroic” times and are necessarily more skeptical of the results. To be an heir always carries a certain “status cynicism” with it, as is well known from stories about the inheritance of family capital.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 6

Family , Time , Loyalty

“One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, Civil Rights Address

Hope

“Privilege is basically a form of property, and as John Locke pointed out, property is what makes a civilization rather than a Libyan war zone of Hobbesian anarchy. The world is a better place when people can work constructively to earn privileges, individual and collective, and pass some of them on to their heirs.”

Steve Sailer (1958) American journalist and movie critic

Checking Iron Age Barbarian Prejudice http://takimag.com/article/checking_iron_age_barbarian_prejudice_steve_sailer/print#ixzz4A7r77jkG, Taki's Magazine, April 22, 2015

War , People , World

“Jay gave me a co-sign like I was RocaWear, but be clear I'm not the air/heir
I'm the water, fire and the earth
That means I'm doing dirt, spitting flames and quenching thirst”

Lupe Fiasco (1982) rapper

"Popular Demand"
Mixtapes, Enemy of the State: A Love Story (2009)

Water

“While darkness covered the earth and gross darkness the people, long after the authority to administer in holy things had been taken away, the Lord opened the heavens and sent forth his word for the salvation of Israel. In fulfillment of the sacred scripture, the everlasting gospel was proclaimed by the mighty angel (Moroni), who, clothed with the authority of his mission, gave glory to God in the highest. This gospel is the ‘stone taken from the mountain without hands.’ John the Baptist, holding the keys of the Aaronic Priesthood; Peter, James and John, holding the keys of the Melchizedek Priesthood, have also ministered for those who shall be heirs of salvation, and with these ministrations ordained men to the same priesthoods. These priesthoods, with their authority, are now, and must continue to be, in the body of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Blessed is the elder who has received the same, and thrice blessed and holy is he who shall endure to the end. Accept assurances, dear brother, of the unfeigned prayer of him who, in connection with Joseph the Seer, was blessed with the above ministrations and who earnestly and devoutly hopes to meet you in the celestial glory.”

Oliver Cowdery (1806–1850) American Mormon leader

Statement from Cowdery to Elder Samuel W. Richards, Oliver Cowdery’s Last Letter, Deseret News, (March 22, 1884).

Men , God , People , Hope

“Of justice yet must God in fine restore,
This noble crowne unto the lawful heire
For right will alwayes live, and rise at length,
But wrong can never take deepe roote to last.”

Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset (1536–1608) English politician and poet

Gorboduc (1561), Act 5, sc. 2, last lines; the play was written in collaboration with Thomas Norton, though Acts 4 and 5 were apparently Sackville's work alone.

God , Justice , Law

“Mathematics and philosophy are cultivated by two different classes of men: some make them an object of pursuit, either in consequence of their situation, or through a desire to render themselves illustrious, by extending their limits; while others pursue them for mere amusement, or by a natural taste which inclines them to that branch of knowledge. It is for the latter class of mathematicians and philosophers that this work is chiefly intended j and yet, at the same time, we entertain a hope that some parts of it will prove interesting to the former. In a word, it may serve to stimulate the ardour of those who begin to study these sciences; and it is for this reason that in most elementary books the authors endeavour to simplify the questions designed for exercising beginners, by proposing them in a less abstract manner than is employed in the pure mathematics, and so as to interest and excite the reader's curiosity. Thus, for example, if it were proposed simply to divide a triangle into three, four, or five equal parts, by lines drawn from a determinate point within it, in this form the problem could be interesting to none but those really possessed of a taste for geometry. But if, instead of proposing it in this abstract manner, we should say: "A father on his death-bed bequeathed to his three sons a triangular field, to be equally divided among them: and as there is a well in the field, which must be common to the three co-heirs, and from which the lines of division must necessarily proceed, how is the field to be divided so as to fulfill the intention of the testator?"”

Jean-Étienne Montucla (1725–1799) French mathematician

This way of stating it will, no doubt, create a desire in most minds to discover the method of solving the problem; and however little taste people may possess for real science, they will be tempted to try iheir ingenuity in finding the answer to such a question at this.
Source: Preface to Recreations in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. (1803), p. ii; As cited in: Tobias George Smollett. The Critical Review: Or, Annals of Literature http://books.google.com/books?id=T8APAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA410, Volume 38, (1803), p. 410

Death , Men , People , Books

“Everything that would be said against the Eixample's heirs, from Le Corbusier's 'ville radieuse' to Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia, was already said, with far less justice, about the Eixample itself. And all its critics concurred that the basic mistake was to have left the planning of a city in the hands of a socialist.”

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) Australian critic, historian, writer

Page 284
Barcelona (1992)

Justice

“Cecil Forrester was heir to many misfortunes, being handsome, rich, high-born, and clever.”

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

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

“Protocols:
Number 24, paras. 3-15
Certain members of the sneed of David will prepare the kings and their heirs inducting them into the most secret mysteries of the political, into schemes of government, but providing always that none may come to knowledge of the secrets….
The king’s plan of action for the current moment, and all the more so for the future, will be unknown, even to those who are called his closest counselors. <br? Only the king and the three who stood sponsor for him will know what is coming.
In the person of the king who with unbending will is master.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005)

Secret , Knowledge , Future , Personality

“Bright flower! whose home is everywhere
Bold in maternal nature's care
And all the long year through the heir
Of joy or sorrow,
Methinks that there abides in thee
Some concord with humanity,
Given to no other flower I see
The forest through.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

To the Daisy (third poem), st. 1 (1803).

Home , Flowers , Nature , Joy

“… We cannot get big grants to do field work anymore. … Will the next generation of conservation biologists be nothing but a bunch of computer nerds with no firsthand knowledge of natural history? … The naturalists are dying off and have few heirs.”

Reed Noss (1952)

[The naturalists are dying off, Conservation Biology, 10, 1, February 1996, 1–3, 10.1046/j.1523-1739.1996.10010001.x] (quote from p. 1)

History , Nature , Knowledge

“I do not want to heap coals of fire on anyone's head, but I would like to advise those who keep the living thought of the dead hidden away in cardboard boxes, to pass on as quickly as possibly such explosive material, whose only legitimate heir is the whole world, that is to say, my neighbor.”

Pierre Schaeffer (1910–1995) French musicologist

The Old Man and His Movements (Times Press, 1964)
Literary works

World , Dead , Box

“On Barack Obama: "No one knew what the new brand actually stood for. So accomplished was the advertising (a record $75m was spent on television commercials alone) that many Americans actually believed Obama shared their opposition to Bush’s wars. In fact, he had repeatedly backed Bush’s warmongering and its congressional funding. Many Americans also believed he was the heir to Martin Luther King’s legacy of anti-colonialism. Yet if Obama had a theme at all, apart from the vacuous 'Change you can believe in,' it was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully. 'We will be the most powerful,' he often declared."”

John Pilger (1939) Australian journalist

John Pilger, "The Madmen Did Well" http://www.newstatesman.com/north-america/2009/05/barack-obama-pilger-bush, New Statesman, 30 April 2009

War , Change

“Justification is the act of God as a Judge; adoption as a Father; by the former we are discharged from condemnation, and accepted as righteous; by the latter we are made the children of God and joint-heirs with Christ.”

John Guyse (1680–1761) British independent minister

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 362.

God , Children , Christ

“Tolstoy becomes intelligible when he is interpreted as a nineteenth century Russian who participates, in the depths of his unconscious soul as well as consciously, in the cultural movements of his time, and in the Russian mystic sense of community with men and nature. It is so with all the members of the radical Christian group. When they meet Christ they do so as heirs of a culture which they cannot reject because it is part of them.”

H. Richard Niebuhr (1894–1962) American theologian

Source: Christ and Culture (1951), p. 70

Men , Soul , Intelligence , Communication

“Masonically we are heirs of past. Our Masonic ancestors gave the craft devotion, loyalty and faith and made it an illustrious institution in the world. It should be our religious duty to appreciate and conserve the rich inheritance. In view of the increasing complexity of life and the maintenance of the best and highest traditions of the Craft, great care and concern should be displayed, if Freemasonry has to function in the best interests of humanity. It has been truly said, that an inspired and inspiring dedication to service should be the part of every Mason’s life. Let us not give in to skepticism. There is all the difference between a pessimist and an optimist, in any field of human endeavour. One looks at his glass and cries “My glass is half empty.””

Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar (1919–1974) Indian writer

The optimist looks and exclaims “My glass is half full”.
In his address to the members of the Masonic Fraternity on the occassion of his joining as member of the Masonic Lodge. quoted in "Article # 14 Initiate responds to his Toast R.W.Bro. Jaya Chamaraja Wadeyar".

Life , World , Faith , Past

“For this creating to take place (as it does from time to time) words have to be accepted as heirs of their forebears, as we are of ours. And in each case, what exists is often only a bankrupt inheritance; or the hinterlands of the unspoken.”

Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016) English poet and professor

A matter of timing: The Guardian, Saturday 21 September 2002 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/sep/21/featuresreviews.guardianreview28/print

Time

“Aspirations pure and high —
Strength to do and to endure —
Heir of all the Ages, I —
Lo! I am no longer poor!”

Julia Caroline Dorr (1825–1913) American writer

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 455.

Age

“The Sun editorial on Roosevelt this morning begins: "Franklin D. Roosevelt was a great man."… The argument, in brief, is that all his skullduggeries and imbecilities were wiped out when "he took an inert and profoundly isolationist people and brought them to support a necessary war on a scale never before imagined." In other words, his greatest fraud was his greatest glory, and his sufficient excuse for all his other frauds. It seems to me to be very likely that Roosevelt will take a high place in American popular history -- maybe even alongside Washington and Lincoln… He had every quality that morons esteem in their heros. It will be to the interest of all his heirs and assigns to whoop him up, and they will probably succeed in swamping his critics.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

April 13, 1945
1940s–present, The Diary of H.L. Mencken (1989)

War , People , Imagination , History

“I have tried to show how religion, the backbone of civilisation, hardens into a Church that is unacceptable to Outsiders, and the Outsiders — the men who strive to become visionaries — become the Rebels. In our case, the scientific progress that has brought us closer than ever before to conquering the problems of civilisation, has also robbed us of spiritual drive; and the Outsider is doubly a rebel: a rebel against the Established Church, a rebel against the unestablished church of materialism. Yet for all this, he is the real spiritual heir of the prophets, of Jesus and St. Peter, of St. Augustine and Peter Waldo. The purest religion of any age lies in the hands of its spiritual rebels. The twentieth century is no exception.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Religion and the Rebel (1957), p. 320

Men , Age , Religion , Problem

“Merely to come into the world the heir of a fortune is not to be born, but to be still-born, rather. To be supported by the charity of friends, or a government-pension, — provided you continue to breathe, — by whatever fine synonymes you describe these relations, is to go into the almshouse.”

Henry David Thoreau book Life Without Principle

Life Without Principle (1863)

World , Support

“My Lords, I rejoice that the grave has not closed upon me; that I am still alive to lift up my voice against the dismemberment of this ancient and most noble monarchy! Pressed down as I am by the hand of infirmity, I am little able to assist my country in this most perilous conjuncture; but, my Lords, while I have sense and memory, I will never consent to deprive the royal offspring of the House of Brunswick, the heirs of the Princess Sophia, of their fairest inheritance. Where is the man that will dare to advise such a measure? My Lords, his Majesty succeeded to an empire as great in extent as its reputation was unsullied. Shall we tarnish the lustre of this nation by an ignominious surrender of its rights and fairest possessions? Shall this great kingdom, that has survived, whole and entire, the Danish depredations, the Scottish inroads, and the Norman conquest; that has stood the threatened invasion of the Spanish Armada, now fall prostrate before the House of Bourbon? Surely, my Lords, this nation is no longer what it was! Shall a people, that seventeen years ago was the terror of the world, now stoop so low as to tell its ancient inveterate enemy, take all we have, only give us peace? It is impossible! …My Lords, any state is better than despair. Let us at least make one effort; and if we must fall, let us fall like men!”

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

Speech in the House of Lords (7 April 1778), 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. xv-xvi.

Men , People , World , Peace

“Rather, we heirs of Enlightenment think of enemies of liberal democracy like Nietzsche or Loyola as, to use Rawls’s word, “mad.” We do so because there is no way to see them as fellow citizens of our constitutional democracy, people whose life plans might, given ingenuity and good will, be fitted in with those of other citizens. They are crazy because the limits of sanity are set by what we can take seriously. This, in turn, is determined by our upbringing, our historical situation.”

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) American philosopher

"The priority of democracy to philosophy"

Life , People , Way , Democracy

“All the Hellenistic States had thus been completely subjected to the protectorate of Rome, and the whole empire of Alexander the Great had fallen to the Roman commonwealth just as if the city had inherited it from his heirs. From all sides kings and ambassadors flocked to Rome to congratulate her; they showed that fawning is never more abject than when kings are in the antechamber…w:Polybius dates from the battle of Pydna the full establishment of the universal empire of Rome. It was in fact the last battle in which a civilized state confronted Rome in the field on a footing of equality with her as a great power; all subsequent struggles were rebellions or wars with peoples beyond the pale of the Romano-Greek civilization -- with barbarians, as they were called. The whole civilized world thenceforth recognized in the Roman senate the supreme tribunal, whose commissions decided in the last resort between kings and nations; and to acquire its language and manners foreign princes and youths of quality resided in Rome. A clear and earnest attempt to get rid of this dominion was in reality made only once -- by the great Mithradates of Pontus. The battle of pydna, moreover, marks the last occasion on which the senate still adhered to the state-maxim that that they should, if possible, hold no possessions and maintain no garrisons beyond the Italian seas, but should keep the numerous states dependent on them in order by a mere political supremacy. The aim aim of their policy was that these states should neither decline into utter weakness and anarchy, as had nevertheless happened in Greece nor emerge out of their half-free position into complete independence, as Macedonia had attempted to do without success. No state was to be allowed to utterly perish, but no one was to be permitted to stand on its own resources… Indications of a change of system, and of an increasing disinclination on the part of Rome to tolerate by its side intermediate states even in such independence as was possible for them, were clearly given in the destruction of the Macedonian monarchy after the battle of Pydna, the more and more frequent and more unavoidable the intervention in the internal affairs of the petty Greek states through their misgovernment, and their political and social anarchy, the disarming of Macedonia, where the Northern forntier at any rate urgently required a defence different from that of mere posts; and, lastly, the introduction of the payment of land-tax to Rome from Macedonia and Illyria, were so many symptoms of the approaching conversion of the client states into subjects of Rome.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

The Changing of the Relationship between Rome and Her Client-States
The History Of Rome, Volume 2. Chapter 10. "The Third Macedonian War" Translated by W.P.Dickson
The History of Rome - Volume 2

War , People , Youth , World

“A boundless vision grows upon us; an untamed continent; vast wastes of forest verdure; mountains silent in primeval sleep; river, lake, and glimmering pool; wilderness oceans mingling with the sky. Such was the domain which France conquered for Civilization. Plumed helmets gleamed in the shade of its forests, priestly vestments in its dens and fastnesses of ancient barbarism. Men steeped in antique learning, pale with the close breath of the cloister, here spent the noon and evening of their lives, ruled savage hordes with a mild, parental sway, and stood serene before the direst shapes of death. Men of courtly nurture, heirs to the polish of a far-reaching ancestry, here, with their dauntless hardihood, put to shame the boldest sons of toil.”

Francis Parkman (1823–1893) American historian

Introduction
Pioneers of France in the New World (1865)

Death , Men , Mountain , Parent

“Among the English, we see on one side an exhibition of grossness and impudence in wickedness, and on the other, we admire their strictness and lofty eminence in that which is good. In that country, interest and conscience measure every thing. There is nothing intermediate between the two motives.In France, on the contrary, the gap between interest and conscience is admirably filled by honour. … In its origin, honour had for its office to take the place of conscience. Where it was deficient, honour presented itself the heir, the distant relation of conscience. … But honour itself is becoming weak. … If this progress continues, it will end by being extinguished. But which will then become the heir of honour? Will it be interest or conscience?”

Alexandre Vinet (1797–1847) Swiss theologian

History of French Literature in the Eighteenth Century (1854), pp. 366-367.

Distant , Country

“The nature of this melancholy becomes clearer, once one asks the question, with whom does the historical writer of historicism actually empathize. The answer is irrefutably with the victor. Those who currently rule are however the heirs of all those who have ever been victorious. Empathy with the victors thus comes to benefit the current rulers every time.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

VII, often misquoted as "History is written by the victors"
(1940)

Question , Nature , Time , Victory

“Infelicity is an ill to which all acts are heir which have the general character of ritual or ceremonial, all conventional acts.”

J. L. Austin (1911–1960) English philosopher

Austin (1975, p. 18–19) as cited in: James Loxley (2006) Performativity. p. 81.

“The fight against communal forces must be fought unitedly. We are the heirs to Panditji’s scientific outlook; and to Indiraji’s struggle against the forces of destabilization – terrorists, separatists, and communalists. We cannot fail them. Communalism must not be used as a political tool. If I may read a sentence from the secret Will of Babar to his son, Humayun: It is incumbent on thee to wipe all religious prejudices of the tablet of thy heart.”

Rajiv Gandhi (1944–1991) sixth Prime Minister of India

In “Memorable Quote, Memorable Quotes from Rajiv Gandhi and on Rajiv Gandhis from Rajiv Gandhi and on Rajiv Gandhi (2009)” , Quote 41
Quote

Secret , Communication , Reading , Heart

“4368. That Patient is not like to recover, that makes the Doctor his Heir.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Compare Poor Richard's Almanack (1733) : He's a Fool that makes his Doctor his Heir.
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

“[The situation was] as in the case of his majesty's having undergone a natural and perfect demise…There was then a person in the kingdom different from any other person that any existing precedents could refer to—an heir apparent of full age and capacity to exercise the royal power. It behoved them, therefore, to waste not a moment unnecessarily, but to proceed with all becoming speed and all becoming diligence to restore the sovereign power and the exercise of royal authority.”

Charles James Fox (1749–1806) British Whig statesman

Speech in the House of Commons (10 December 1788) advocating the Prince of Wales being appointed Regent, reprinted in J. Wright (ed.), The Speeches of the Rt. Hon. C. J. Fox in the House of Commons. Volume III (1815), pp. 400-401.
1780s

Age , Exercises , Nature , Personality

“For 20 years past, either as Heir Apparent, Regent of the Empire, or as Emperor, I have never ceased to use all my efforts to bring my country the benefits of civilization, and in particular to establish relations of good neighbourliness with adjacent powers. In particular I succeeded in concluding with Italy the Treaty of Friendship of 1928, which absolutely prohibited the resort, under any pretext whatsoever, to force of arms, substituting for force and pressure the conciliation and arbitration on which civilized nations have based international order.”

Haile Selassie (1892–1975) Emperor of Ethiopia

Address to the League of Nations (1936)

Friendship , Effort , Past , Country

“Though Rather is congenitally bad – an admirable heir to Walter Cronkite and his special form of treasonous broadcasting – more insidious are certain chirpy girl-next-door morning TV hosts who characterize the beliefs of ordinary middle-class Americans in terms that would make Goebbels blush.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

2002, Ann Coulter : Left Is 'out to Destroy the Country' (2002)

Girl

“In most British enterprises senior executives worked closely in the same office building, located in or near the largest plant, having almost daily personal contact with, and thus directly supervising middle and often lower-level managers. Such enterprises had no need for the detailed organization charts and manuals that had come into common use in large American and German firms before 1914. In these British companies, selection to senior positions and to the board depended as much on personal ties as on managerial competence. The founders and their heirs continued to have a significant influence on top-level decision-making even after their holdings in the enterprise were diminished.”

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. (1918–2007) American historian

Source: The Visible Hand (1977), p. 242.

Decision , Dependency , Personality

“Among the ancient painters, the Tuscan's are the ones that interest me more: above all Giotto and Massacio [in early Renaissance]. Of the modern painters I think that Corot, Courbet, Fattori, and Cezanne are the most legitimate heirs to the glorious Italian tradition.”

Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) Italian painter

Quote from an article in the Bolognese fascist magazine 'L'Assalto', 18 Febr. 1928; as cited in 'Morandi 1894 – 1964', published by Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, ed: M. C. Bandera & R. Miracco - 2008; p. 107
1925 - 1945

Thinking

“When my young master's worship comes to town,
From pedagogue and mother just fit free,
The heir and hopes of a great famiiy;
Who with strong beer and beef the country rules,
And ever since the Conquest have been fools;
And now, with careful prospect to maintain
This character, lest crossing of the strain
Should mend the booby breed, his friends provide
A cousin of his own to be his bride…”

John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647–1680) English poet, and peer of the realm

A Letter from Artemisia in Town to Chloe in the Country (1679)

Hope , Fools , Beer , Strong

“The peasantry … were the true philosophers of the modern world, the heirs to classical sages such as Seneca and Socrates. Only they knew how to live, precisely because they knew nothing much about anything else.”

Sarah Bakewell book How to Live

Source: How to Live, or, A Life of Montaigne in one Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (2010), p. 51.

World

“In our African tradition, there are never two chiefs; there is sometimes a natural heir to the chief, but can anyone tell me that he has ever known a village that has two chiefs? That is why we Congolese, in the desire to conform to the traditions of our continent, have resolved to group all the energies of the citizens of our country under the banner of a single national party.”

Mobutu Sésé Seko (1930–1997) President of Zaïre

Young and Turner, p. 211

Nature , Country

“To the Congress of the United States. The present state of the Union, upon which it is customary for the President to report to the Congress under the provisions of the Constitution, is such that it may be regarded with encouragement and satisfaction by every American. Our country is almost unique in its ability to discharge fully and promptly all its obligations at home and abroad, and provide for all its inhabitants an increase in material resources, in intellectual vigor and in moral power. The Nation holds a position unsurpassed in all former human experience. This does not mean that we do not have any problems. It is elementary that the increasing breadth of our experience necessarily increases the problems of our national life. But it does mean that if all will but apply ourselves industriously and honestly, we have ample powers with which to meet our problems and provide for I heir speedy solution. I do not profess that we can secure an era of perfection in human existence, but we can provide an era of peace and prosperity, attended with freedom and justice and made more and more satisfying by the ministrations of the charities and humanities of life.”

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

1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)

Life , Peace , Justice , Home

“So now, for mercy and honor shown to my people, my lord is barbarous; a tyrant, because he punished his would-be murderers, the right of their meanest citizen; a mere vaunting soldier, though wherever he went he brought Greece with him, the Greece he honored, of which these liars are the unworthy heirs.”

Mary Renault book The Persian Boy

Source: The Persian Boy (1972), p. 269

People

“Blessings be with them, and eternal praise,
Who gave us nobler loves, and nobler cares!—
The Poets, who on earth have made us heirs
Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Personal Talk, Stanza 4.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Love , Truth

“I am neither heir nor executor to Charles Stuart.”

Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) English military and political leader

Repudiating a royal debt (August 1651)

“We may not appreciate the fact; but a fact nevertheless it remains: we are living in a Golden Age, the most gilded Golden Age of human history — not only of past history, but of future history. For, as Sir Charles Darwin and many others before him have pointed out, we are living like drunken sailors, like the irresponsible heirs of a millionaire uncle. At an ever accelerating rate we are now squandering the capital of metallic ores and fossil fuels accumulated in the earth’s crust during hundreds of millions of years. How long can this spending spree go on? Estimates vary. But all are agreed that within a few centuries or at most a few millennia, Man will have run through his capital and will be compelled to live, for the remaining nine thousand nine hundred and seventy or eighty centuries of his career as Homo sapiens, strictly on income. Sir Charles is of the opinion that Man will successfully make the transition from rich ores to poor ores and even sea water, from coal, oil, uranium and thorium to solar energy and alcohol derived from plants. About as much energy as is now available can be derived from the new sources — but with a far greater expense in man hours, a much larger capital investment in machinery. And the same holds true of the raw materials on which industrial civilization depends. By doing a great deal more work than they are doing now, men will contrive to extract the diluted dregs of the planet’s metallic wealth or will fabricate non-metallic substitutes for the elements they have completely used up. In such an event, some human beings will still live fairly well, but not in the style to which we, the squanderers of planetary capital, are accustomed.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

"Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" in Adonis and the Alphabet (1956); later in Collected Essays (1959), p. 293

Men , Alcohol , Age , History

“They fear others—that is why they sought positions of power. Their greatest dream is to have a King who dances when they move the threads: and for Massenet, to marry his child to the heir of Entonne, and sit his grandson upon the throne. The ordinary desires of those who rise to such positions. In their appetites, they are not men of great originality. Though they will do enormous harm in spite of that.”

Sean Russell (1952) author

Source: Sea Without a Shore (1996), Chapter 37 (p. 526)

Men , Fear , Dreams , Dance

“These legal disputes hinder the adequate education of our youth. It has negative impacts on the overall development of the nation in tapping and harnessing the talents of the Filipino youth, if schools, considered as their second abode, is constantly threatened with legal disputes and uncertainties. We have seen and heard cases that upon the death of the donors, heirs claim ownership of the land through revocation of the original donation. These result to endless court litigations. The passage of this bill will pave the way for simplifying the process of land titling registration of almost 90 percent of school sites in favor of the DepEd.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Journal http://www.journal.com.ph/news/nation/summary-titling-of-lands-occupied-by-schools-pushed
2015

Death , Youth , Education , School

“Had Abraham Lincoln died from any of the numerous ills to which flesh is heir; had he reached that good old age of which his vigorous constitution and his temperate habits gave promise; had he been permitted to see the end of his great work; had the solemn curtain of death come down but gradually, we should still have been smitten with a heavy grief, and treasured his name lovingly. But dying as he did die, by the red hand of violence, killed, assassinated, taken off without warning, not because of personal hate, for no man who knew Abraham Lincoln could hate him, but because of his fidelity to union and liberty, he is doubly dear to us, and his memory will be precious forever. Fellow citizens, I end, as I began, with congratulations. We have done a good work for our race today. In doing honor to the memory of our friend and liberator, we have been doing highest honors to ourselves and those who come after us. We have been fastening ourselves to a name and fame imperishable and immortal; we have also been defending ourselves from a blighting scandal. When now it shall be said that the colored man is soulless, that he has no appreciation of benefits or benefactors; when the foul reproach of ingratitude is hurled at us, and it is attempted to scourge us beyond the range of human brotherhood, we may calmly point to the monument we have this day erected to the memory of Abraham Lincoln.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1870s, Oratory in Memory of Abraham Lincoln (1876)

Death , Hate , Age , Color

“St. Jerome, whose heir methinks I am in the endurance of foul slander, says in his letter to Nepotanius: "The apostle says: 'If I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ.' He no longer seeks to please men, and so is made Christ's servant" (Epist. 2). And again, in his letter to Asella regarding those whom he was falsely accused of loving: "I give thanks to my God that I am worthy to be one whom the world hates" (Epist. 99). And to the monk Heliodorus he writes: "You are wrong, brother, you are wrong if you think there is ever a time when the Christian does not suffer persecution. For our adversary goes about as a roaring lion seeking what he may devour, and do you still think of peace? Nay, he lieth in ambush among the rich."
Inspired by those records and examples, we should endure our persecutions all the more steadfastly the more bitterly they harm us. We should not doubt that even if they are not according to our deserts, at least they serve for the purifying of our soul. And since all things are done in accordance with the divine ordering, let every one of true faith console himself amid all his afflictions with the thought that the great goodness of God permits nothing to be done without reason, and brings to a good end whatsoever may seem to happen wrongfully. Wherefore rightly do all men say: "Thy will be done." And great is the consolation to all lovers of God in the word of the Apostle when he says: "We know that all things work together for good to them that love God" (Rom. viii, 28). The wise man of old had this in mind when he said in his Proverbs: "There shall no evil happen to the just" (Prov. xii, 21). By this he clearly shows that whosoever grows wrathful for any reason against his sufferings has therein departed from the way of the just, because he may not doubt that these things have happened to him by divine dispensation. ///Even such are those who yield to their own rather than to the divine purpose, and with hidden desires resist the spirit which echoes in the words, "Thy will be done," thus placing their own will ahead of the will of God. Farewell.”

Peter Abelard (1079–1142) French scholastic philosopher, theologian and preeminent logician

Source: Historia Calamitatum (c. 1132), Ch. XV

Love , Men , God , Hate

“It's rooted in the fears to which all men are heir and, thus, deserves sympathy, not censure or laughter. The dream may be out of touch with history, but it's a good dream, and it doesn't appear to have been used to bilk gullible widows out of their savings. Never mind that we have a consistent record of slaughtering our messiahs. Look beyond the wacky arguments to the motivation — that sense of brotherhood which is all that has ever saved mankind from going over the brink.”

Frank Herbert (1920–1986) American writer

On belief in UFOs, in "Flying Saucers: Fact or Farce?", San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, "People" supplement, (20 October 1963); reprinted in The Maker of Dune : Insights of a Master of Science Fiction (1987), edited by Tim O'Reilly
General sources

Men , Fear , Dreams , History

“To me, there is no doctrine so infinitely absurd as the idea that this life is a probationary state—that the few moments spent here decide the fate of a human soul forever. Nothing can be conceived more merciless, more unjust. I am doing all I can to destroy that doctrine. I want, if possible, to get the shadow of hell from the human heart. Why has any life been a failure here? If God is a being of infinite wisdom and kindness, why does he make failures? What excuse has infinite wisdom for peopling the world with savages? Why should one feel grateful to God for having made him with a poor, weak and diseased brain; for having allowed him to be the heir of consumption, of scrofula, or of insanity? Why should one thank God, who lived and died a slave”

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

"To the Indianapolis Clergy." The Iconoclast (Indianapolis, IN) (1883)

Life , Wisdom , God , Fate

“Sexuality and eroticism are the intricate intersection of nature and culture. Feminists grossly oversimplify the problem of sex when they reduce it a matter of social convention: readjust society, eliminate sexual inequality, purify sex roles, and happiness and harmony will reign. Here feminism, like all liberal movements of the past two hundred years, is heir to Rousseau.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 1

Sex , Nature , Problem , Past

“The people of Iran are very talented people. They're heirs to one of the world's great civilizations. But in 1979, they were hijacked by religious zealots; religious zealots who imposed on them immediately a dark and brutal dictatorship. That year, the zealots drafted a constitution, a new one for Iran. It directed the revolutionary guards not only to protect Iran's borders, but also to fulfill the ideological mission of jihad. The regime's founder, Ayatollah Khomeini, exhorted his followers to "export the revolution throughout the world." I'm standing here in Washington, D. C. and the difference is so stark. America's founding document promises life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Iran's founding document pledges death, tyranny, and the pursuit of jihad. And as states are collapsing across the Middle East, Iran is charging into the void to do just that.”

Benjamín Netanyahu (1949) Israeli prime minister

2010s, 2015, Address to the United States Congress (March 2015)

Life , Death , People , World

“If an infinite God created us all, he knew exactly what we would do. If he gave us free will it does not change the result, because he knew how we would use the free will. Now, if he knew that billions upon billions would refuse to take the remedy, and consequently would suffer eternal pain, why create them? There would have been much less misery in the world had he left them dust. What right has a God to make a failure? Why should he change dust into a sentient being, knowing that that being was to be the heir of endless agony?”

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

A Christmas Sermon (1890)

God , Pain , World , Failure

“In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.
This note was a promise that all men, yes black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, (1963)

Life , Men , People , Justice

“We foreign journalists in Moscow used to amuse ourselves, as a matter of fact, by competing with one another as to who could wish upon one of these intelligentsia visitors to the USSR the most outrageous fantasy…One story I floated myself, for which I received considerable acclaim, was that the huge queues outside food shops came about because the Soviet workers were so ardent in building Socialism that they just wouldn't rest, and the only way the government could get them to rest for even two or three hours was organizing a queue for them to stand in. I laugh at it all now, but at the time you can imagine what a shock it was to someone like myself, who had been brought up to regard liberal intellectuals as the samurai, the absolute elite, of the human race, to find that they could be taken in by deceptions which a half-witted boy would see through in an instant…I could never henceforth regard the intelligentsia as other than credulous fools who nonetheless became the media's prophetic voices, their heirs and successors remaining so still.”

Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990) English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist

The Great Liberal Death Wish, lecture at Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan, USA, March 1979. Transcript in Imprimis http://imprimisarchives.hillsdale.edu/file/archives/pdf/1979_05_Imprimis.pdf May 1979 (pdf).

Food , Fools , Way , Imagination