Quotes about inheritance

A collection of quotes on the topic of inheritance, use, world, other.

Quotes about inheritance

“Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Source: Letters to a Young Poet

Love, Faith, Travel, Faith

“Grace is the seed of glory, the dawning of glory in the heart, and therefore grace is the earnest of the future inheritance.”

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) Christian preacher, philosopher, and theologian

Source: The Religious Affections

Future, Heart

“Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, "tradition" should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year…”

T.S. Eliot book Tradition and the Individual Talent

Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Way, Sense, Success

“You will have seen that my brother died suddenly in Marseilles. I inherit from him a title, but not a penny of money, as he was bankrupt. A title is a great nuisance to me, and I am at a loss what to do, but at any rate I do not wish it employed in connection with any of my literary work. There is, so far as I know, only one method of getting rid of it, which is to be attainted of high treason, and this would involve my head being cut off on Tower Hill. This method seems to me perhaps somewhat extreme…”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Letter to W. W. Norton, 11 March, 1931
1930s

Money, Loss

“Understanding human history in the millennia following the Agricultural Revolution boils down to a single question: how did humans organise themselves in mass-cooperation networks, when they lacked the biological instincts necessary to sustain such networks? The short answer is that humans created imagined orders and devised scripts. These two inventions filled the gaps left by our biological inheritance.”

Yuval Noah Harari book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Imagination, History, Understanding, Question

“We know a history so that we can learn from it. We learn our history because we understand the sacrifices that were made before, so that when we make sacrifices we understand we're doing it on behalf of future generations. There’s a proverb that says, “We have not inherited this land from our forebears, we have borrowed it from our children.” In other words, we study the past so it can guide us into the future, and inspire us to do better.”

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

2015, Remarks to the Kenyan People (July 2015)

Children, History, Understanding, Study

“Or rather, I inherited the acquired trait of the by-product, wealth, but none of the energy, none of the strength of the steel that made it. I am sired by gold and damned by it, as they say at the race track — damned in more ways than one.”

Eugene O'Neill The Hairy Ape

Mildred: Scene 2
The Hairy Ape (1922)

Way, Wealth

“94. I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book On Certainty

On Certainty (1969)

World, Falseness

“Thank heaven I don't inherit God from anybody! I am free to make mine up as I wish Him. He's kind and sympathetic and imaginative and forgiving and understanding - and He has a sense of humor.”

Jean Webster (1876–1916) American novelist

God, Imagination, Forgiveness, Understanding

“Wisdom with an inheritance is good, but wisdom without an inheritance is better than an inheritance without wisdom.”

Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672) Anglo-American poet

Wisdom

“The blood of Abraham,1 God’s father of the chosen, still flows in the veins of Arab, Jew, and Christian, and too much of it has been spilled in grasping for the inheritance of the revered patriarch in the Middle East. The spilled blood in the Holy Land still cries out to God—an anguished cry for peace.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Source: Palestine Peace Not Apartheid

God, Peace, Cry

“Libraries are not made; they grow. Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.”

Augustine Birrell (1850–1933) British politician

Variant: Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.

“You know what's wrong with scientific power? It's a form of inherited wealth. And you know what assholes congenitally rich people are.”

Michael Crichton book Jurassic Park

Source: Jurassic Park

People, Wealth

“The meek may inherit the earth, but at the moment it belongs to the conceited. Like me.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Source: City of Bones

“God created dinosaurs. God destroyed dinosaurs. God created Man. Man destroyed God. Man created dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs eat man… Woman inherits the earth.”

Michael Crichton book Jurassic Park

Source: Jurassic Park

God

“THE MAJORITY of children born into the world tend to inherit the beliefs of their parents, and that to me is one of the most regrettable facts of them all”

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

Children, World, Parent

“There comes a point when the confused or abused person hears a voice saying in his head, Oh well, might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, and, depending on the particular situation in which he finds him he either spends his last bit of money on a lottery ticket, or places on the gaming table the watch he inherited from his father and silver cigarette case that was a gift from his mother, or bets everything he has on red even though he knows that red has come up five times in a row”

José Saramago book The Cave

Source: The Cave (2000), p. 14 (Vintage 2003)

Money, Game, Time, Dependency

“Hereditary succession has no claim. For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have the right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever, and tho' himself might deserve some decent degree of honours of his contemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them.”

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist

1770s, Common Sense (1776)

Men, Family, Birth, Success

“I inherited honesty and self-discipline from my father; from my mother, I inherited faith in goodness and deep kindness as did my three brothers and sisters.”

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam book Wings of Fire

Source: Wings of Fire, p. 8.

Faith, Sister

“The inner labor, the inner values, and the inner difficulties and frictions are too often unknown to those who decide for a vocation, and they are unable to correlate those essential factors of the life-calling with all that nature by inheritance, and society by surroundings and training, have planted and developed in their minds.”

Hugo Munsterberg (1863–1916) German-American psychologist, philosopher and agitator

Source: Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (1913), p. 33

Life, Nature, Training

“As I conclude I reflect on my childhood experience when I would visit a stream next to our home to fetch water for my mother. I would drink water straight from the stream. Playing among the arrowroot leaves I tried in vain to pick up the strands of frogs’ eggs, believing they were beads. But every time I put my little fingers under them they would break. Later, I saw thousands of tadpoles: black, energetic and wriggling through the clear water against the background of the brown earth. This is the world I inherited from my parents. Today, over 50 years later, the stream has dried up, women walk long distances for water, which is not always clean, and children will never know what they have lost. The challenge is to restore the home of the tadpoles and give back to our children a world of beauty and wonder.”

Wangari Maathai (1940–2011) Kenyan environmental and political activist

Nobel lecture http://nobelprize.org/peace/laureates/2004/maathai-lecture.html (10 December 2004)

Women, Children, World, Beauty

“Have you noticed that life, real honest to goodness life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in newspapers?”

Jean Anouilh (1910–1987) French playwright

Jean Anouilh as cited in: Stuart Allan (2010) News Culture. p. 1

Life

“To begin with, things [after Independence in 1980] went well because [Robert] Mugabe was no fool. He realised [that] it was important to maintain the economy and keep the country expanding. And in any case he was committed to do that by the Lancaster House Agreement which said that there could be no change in [the existing status] for at least seven years unless [he] could get 100% support [from] all the people. In no ways would he have been able to get the support of the white members of Parliament, and also the Matabeles. So we were satisfied that what we were doing was in keeping with the traditions and culture and what was expected of us, and Mugabe used to thank me for coming to see him, [giving] him the benefit of my advice and [telling] him what the white people were thinking. But he only did this for a while because he inherited the best economy in Africa. It was viable. And after two years he quickly changed his mind because he had a lot of money available. He had his [own] commanders in control because he had removed the white commanders who would have taken action against him if he had defied the Lancaster House Agreement before the seven-year [period]. He removed our commanders and put his commanders in so that he knew that he could defy this. And so he breached the Lancaster House Agreement.”

Ian Smith (1919–2007) Prime Minister of Rhodesia

Ian Smith - A Bit Of A Rebel, Ian Smith

Money, People, Fools, Way

“I am a libertine, but I am not a criminal nor a murderer, and since I am compelled to set my apology alongside my vindication, I shall therefore say that it might well be possible that those who condemn me as unjustly as I have been might themselves be unable to offset the infamies by good works as clearly established as those I can contrast to my errors. I am a libertine, but three families residing in your area have for five years lived off my charity, and I have saved them from the farthest depths of poverty. I am a libertine, but I have saved a deserter from death, a deserter abandoned by his entire regiment and by his colonel. I am a libertine, but at Evry, with your whole family looking on, I saved a child—at the risk of my life—who was on the verge of being crushed beneath the wheels of a runaway horse-drawn cart, by snatching the child from beneath it. I am a libertine, but I have never compromised my wife’s health. Nor have I been guilty of the other kinds of libertinage so often fatal to children’s fortunes: have I ruined them by gambling or by other expenses that might have deprived them of, or even by one day foreshortened, their inheritance? Have I managed my own fortune badly, as long as I have had a say in the matter? In a word, did I in my youth herald a heart capable of the atrocities of which I today stand accused?… How therefore do you presume that, from so innocent a childhood and youth, I have suddenly arrived at the ultimate of premeditated horror? No, you do not believe it. And yet you who today tyrannize me so cruelly, you do not believe it either: your vengeance has beguiled your mind, you have proceeded blindly to tyrannize, but your heart knows mine, it judges it more fairly, and it knows full well it is innocent.”

Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) French novelist and philosopher

This passage comes from a letter addressed to his wife. It was written during his imprisonment at the Bastille.
"L’Aigle, Mademoiselle…"

Life, Death, Children, Health

“In every society, a few individuals acquire the status of an elite through talent. Due to superior achievements of wealth, wisdom, and bravery, these individuals come to possess natural authority, and their opinions and judgments enjoy wide-spread respect. Moreover, because of selective mating, marriage, and the laws of civil and genetic inheritance, positions of natural authority are likely to be passed on within a few noble families. It is to the heads of these families with long-established records of superior achievement, farsightedness, and exemplary personal conduct that men turn to with their conflicts and complaints against each other. These leaders of the natural elite act as judges and peacemakers, often free of charge out of a sense of duty expected of a person of authority or out of concern for civil justice as a privately produced "public good."”

Hans-Hermann Hoppe (1949) Austrian school economist and libertarian anarcho-capitalist philosopher

Natural Elites, Intellectuals, and the State http://www.mises.org/etexts/intellectuals.asp (21 July 2006)

Wisdom, Men, Marriage, Family

“Lo! with a little rod
I did but touch the honey of romance —
And must I lose a soul's inheritance?”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Helas! http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/wilde/helas.html, l. 12-14 (1881)

Soul

“[T]here should be a heavily progressive National inheritance tax on big fortunes. The really big fortune, by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. A heavily progressive inheritance tax on all such fortunes (heaviest on absentees) has the good qualities of an income tax, without its drawbacks; it is far more beneﬁcial to the community at large, and far less burdensome to private individuals, as well as far more easily collected. A moderate, but progressive, income tax, carefully devised to fall genuinely on those who ought to pay, would, I believe, he a good thing; but a heavy and heavily progressive inheritance tax on great fortunes would be a far better thing.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, The Progressives, Past and Present (1910)

Men, Communication

“Upon Christmas-day, the people of Rome, who had hitherto elected their Bishop, and reckoned that they and their Senate inherited the rights of the ancient Senate and people of Rome, voted Charles their Emperor, and subjected themselves to him in such manner as the old Roman Empire and their Senate were subjected to the old Roman Emperors. The Pope [Leo III] crowned him, and anointed him with holy oil, and worshiped him on his knees after the manner of adoring the old Roman Emperors… The Emperor, on the other hand, took the following oath to the Pope: In nomine Christi spondeo atque polliceor, Ego Carolus Imperator coram Deo & beato Petro Apostolo, me protectorem ac defensorem fore hujus sanctæ Romanæ Ecclesiæ in omnibus utilitatibus, quatenùs divino fultus fuero adjutorio, prout sciero poteroque. The Emperor was also made Consul of Rome, and his son Pipin crowned King of Italy: and henceforward the Emperor styled himself: Carolus serenissimus, Augustus, à Deo coronatus, magnus, pacificus, Romæ gubernans imperium [Charles, most serene Augustus crowned by God, the great, peaceful emperor ruling the Roman empire], or Imperator Romanorum [Emperor of the Romans]; and was prayed for in the Churches of Rome. His image was henceforward put upon the coins of Rome: while the enemies of the Pope, to the number of three hundred Romans and two or three of the Clergy, were sentenced to death. The three hundred Romans were beheaded in one day in the Lateran fields: but the Clergymen at the intercession of the Pope were pardoned, and banished into France. And thus the title of Roman Emperor, which had hitherto been in the Greek Emperors, was by this act transferred in the West to the Kings of France.”

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

Vol. I, Ch. 7: Of the Eleventh Horn of Daniel's Fourth Beast
Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John (1733)

Death, God, People, Peace

“Apart from sex linkage, we know almost nothing at present of linkage in man. Yet it is certain that every defect determined by a single factor must be located in one or other of twenty-three [sic] linkage groups. Each defect must therefore be linked in inheritance with numerous other observable traits, and with some of them is probably linked closely. The search for such linkage will certainly be lengthy, and at first, disappointing.”

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

Eugenics, academic and practical. Eugenics Review, 27, 95-100, 1935
1930s

Sex, Disappointment, Search

“We know today that nothing will restore the pre-machine condition of reasonably universal employment save an artificial allocation of working hours involving the use of more men than formerly to perform a given task.... The primary function of society, in spite of all the sophistries spurred of selfishness, is to give men better conditions than they could get without it; and the basic need today is jobs for all—not for "property" for a few of the luck and the acquisitive.... In view of the urgent need for change, there is something almost obscene in the chatter of the selfish about various psychological evils allegedly inherent in a New Deal promising decent economic security and humane leisure for all instead of for a few.... What is worth answering is the kindred outcry about "regimentation", "collective slavery", "violation of Anglo-Saxon freedom", "destruction of the right of the individual to make his own way" and so on; with liberal references to Stalin, Hitler, Mustapha Kemal, and other extremist dictators who have sought to control men's personal, intellectual, and artistic lives, and traditional habits and folkways, as well as their economic fortunes. Naturally the Anglo-Saxon balks at any programme calculated to limit his freedom as a man and a thinker or to disturb his inherited perspectives and daily customs—and need we say that no plan ever proposed in an Anglo-Saxon country would conceivably seek to limit such freedom or disturb such perspectives and customs? Here we have a deliberate smoke-screen—conscious and malicious confusion of terms. A decent planned society would indeed vary to some extent the existing regulations (for there are such) governing commercial and economic life. Yet who save a self-confessed Philistine or Marxist (the plutocrat can cite "Das Kapital" for his purpose!) would claim that the details and conditions of our merely economic activities form more than a trivial fraction of our whole lives and personalities? That which is essential and distinctive about a man is not the routine of material struggle he follows in his office; but the civilised way he lives, outside his office, the life whose maintenance is the object of his struggle. So long as his office work gains him a decently abundant and undisputedly free life, it matters little what that work is—what the ownership of the enterprise, and what and how distributed its profits, if profits there be. We have seen that no system proposes to deny skill and diligence an adequate remuneration. What more may skill and diligence legitimately ask? Nor is any lessening in the pride of achievement contemplated. Man will thrill just as much at the overcoming of vast obstacles, and the construction of great works, whether his deeds be performed for service or for profit. As it is, the greatest human achievements have never been for profit. Would Keats or Newton or Lucretius or Einstein or Santayana flourish less under a rationally planned society? Any intimation that a man's life is wholly his industrial life, and that a planned economic order means a suppression of his personality, is really both a piece of crass ignorance and an insult to human nature. Incidentally, it is curious that no one has yet pointed to the drastically regulated economic life of the early Mass. Bay colony as something "American!"”

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

Unpublished (and probably unsent) letter to the Providence Journal (13 April 1934), quoted in Collected Essays, Volume 5: Philosophy, edited by J. T. Joshi, pp. 115-116
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life, Men, Way, Nature

“These oligarchies alone manage the political systems inherited from bourgeois electoral and representative democracy, having succeeded in domesticating the right and left electoral political parties, at the price of eroding the legitimacy of the democratic practice concerned. These oligarchies alone control the propaganda apparatuses, having succeeded in reducing the directors of news organizations including public broadcasters to the status of media clergy in their exclusive service. None of these aspects of the dictatorship of the oligarchy is challenged by the social and political movements at work in the triad, especially not in the United States.”

Samir Amin (1931–2018) Egyptian economist

The Election of Donald Trump https://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2016/amin301116.html (30 November 2016), Monthly Review Magazine (MRzine)

Democracy

“Most men do not feel in themselves the competence required for leading their group to victory, and therefore seek out a captain who appears to possess the courage and sagacity necessary for the achievement of supremacy. Even in religion this impulse appears. Nietzsche accused Christianity of inculcating a slave-morality, but ultimate triumph was always the goal. "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: 1930s, Power: A New Social Analysis (1938), Ch. 2: Leaders and Followers

Men, Religion, Feeling, Courage

“But delightful though it is to indulge in righteous indignation, it is misplaced if we agree with the lady's-maid that high birth is a form of congenital insanity, that the sufferer merely inherits the diseases of his ancestors, and endures them, for the most part very stoically, in one of those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.”

Virginia Woolf The Common Reader

"Outlines: Lady Dorothy Nevill"
The Common Reader (1925)

Disease, Home, Birth, Suffering

“Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children.”

Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) American cognitive scientist

Scientific American (October 1994) http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/sciam.inherit.html

Children

“Literature and the arts are also criticism in a more particular and practical sense. They embody an expository reflection on, a value judgement of, the inheritance and context to which they pertain.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 4 (p. 11).

Art, Literature, Sense

“Why have stockholders?… What contribution do they make, entitling them to heirship of half the profits of the industrial system, receivable partly in the form of dividends, and partly in the form of increased market values resulting from undistributed corporate gains? Stockholders toil not, neither do they spin, to earn that reward. They are beneficiaries by position only. Justification for their inheritance must be sought outside classic economic reasoning…. [and] can be founded only upon social grounds… that justification turns on the distribution as well as the existence of wealth. Its force exists only in direct ratio to the number of individuals who hold such wealth. Justification for the stockholder's existence thus depends on increasing distribution within the American population. Ideally the stockholder's position will be impregnable only when every American family has its fragment of that position and of the wealth by which the opportunity to develop individuality becomes fully actualized.”

Adolf A. Berle (1895–1971) American diplomat

1967, p. xxiii
The Modern Corporation and Private Property. 1932/1967

Family, Dependency, Wealth

“In one of the temptations Satan offers to give Jesus all the kingdoms of the world, that is, the kingdoms and the related political power. …
Jesus refuses to answer the question about the tax. His “render unto Caesar” does not imply that there are two kingdoms, but that everything belongs to God. If Caesar undertakes to manufacture certain things like pieces of money, we should give them back to him; such things are of no interest or importance.
Jesus pays the (political) temple tax with two coins taken from the mouth of a fish. This absurd miracle expresses simple derision and shows once again that such matters are of no importance. Jesus similarly refuses to arbitrate between two men who are contesting an inheritance. He has not come to deal with legal problems.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 114

Men, Money, God, World

“His thoughts, delivered to me
From the white coverlet and pillow,
I see now, were inheritances—
Delicate riders of the storm.”

Hart Crane (1899–1932) American writer

Praise for an Urn (l. 5-8). In The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, by Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair (1988)

“If you ever wonder whether America is big enough to hold multitudes, strong enough to withstand the forces of change, brave enough to live up to our ideals even in times of trial, then look to the generations of ordinary citizens who have proven again and again that we are worthy of that. That’s our great inheritance -- what ordinary people have done to build this country and make these words live. And it’s our generation’s task to follow their example in this journey -- to keep building an America where no matter who we are or what we look like, or who we love or what we believe, we can make of our lives what we will. You will not and should not forget your history and your past. That adds to the richness of American life. But you are now American. You’ve got obligations as citizens. And I’m absolutely confident you will meet them.”

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

2015, Naturalization Ceremony speech (December 2015)

Love, Life, People, Confidence

“Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. The roots of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread. But the time must come when inhumanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness will succumb before humanity championed by thought. Let us work that this time may come.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Memoirs of Childhood and Youth (1924)

Men, Strong, Time

“You received your fortune by inheritance; so be it! Therefore, you have not sinned personally, but how know you that you may not be enjoying the fruits of theft and crime committed before you?”

John Chrysostom (349–407) important Early Church Father

Epist. i. ad Tim., 12, as cited in Francesco Saverio Nitti, Catholic Socialism (1895), p. 67

Personality

“Conflict situations are driven by concepts of victory, power, and elimination of inherited culture, and not by the underlying values of civilization. There are many interpretations of Islam within the wider Islamic community, but generally we are instructed to leave the world a better place than it was when we came into it.”

Aga Khan IV (1936) 49th and current Imam of Nizari Ismailism

Interview with Robert Ivy (FAIA), in Architectural Record (31 August 2001)
Context: Conflict situations are driven by concepts of victory, power, and elimination of inherited culture, and not by the underlying values of civilization. There are many interpretations of Islam within the wider Islamic community, but generally we are instructed to leave the world a better place than it was when we came into it. The Aga Khan Award for Architecture seeks to make a better place in physical terms. This means trying to bring values into environments, buildings, and contexts that improve the quality of life for future generations.

World, Communication, Victory

“We must cherish our inheritance. We must preserve our nationality for the youth of our future. The story should be written down to pass on.”

Louis Riel (1844–1885) Canadian politician

As quoted at Metis crossing official site http://www.metiscrossing.com/multimedia.html

“I believe that there is a fundamental mystery in my existence, transcending any biological account of the development of my body (including my brain) with its genetic inheritance and its evolutionary origin.”

John C. Eccles (1903–1997) Australian neurophysioloigst

Source: Facing Reality (1970), p. 83
Context: I believe that there is a fundamental mystery in my existence, transcending any biological account of the development of my body (including my brain) with its genetic inheritance and its evolutionary origin. … I cannot believe that this wonderful gift of a conscious existence has no further future, no possibility of another existence under some other unimaginable conditions.

“William inherited very large possessions, part of which consisted of crown debts, due to the vice-admiral for sums he had advanced for the sea-service.”

Voltaire (1694–1778) French writer, historian, and philosopher

Variants:
No oaths, no seals, no official mummeries were used; the treaty was ratified on both sides with a yea, yea — the only one, says Voltaire, that the world has known, never sworn to and never broken.
As quoted in William Penn : An Historical Biography (1851) by William Hepworth Dixon
William Penn began by making a league with the Americans, his neighbors. It is the only one between those natives and the Christians which was never sworn to, and the only one that was never broken.
As quoted in American Pioneers (1905), by William Augustus Mowry and Blanche Swett Mowry, p. 80
It was the only treaty made by the settlers with the Indians that was never sworn to, and the only one that was never broken.
As quoted in A History of the American Peace Movement (2008) by Charles F. Howlett, and ‎Robbie Lieberman, p. 33
The History of the Quakers (1762)
Context: William inherited very large possessions, part of which consisted of crown debts, due to the vice-admiral for sums he had advanced for the sea-service. No moneys were at that time less secure than those owing from the king. Penn was obliged to go, more than once, and "thee" and "thou" Charles and his ministers, to recover the debt; and at last, instead of specie, the government invested him with the right and sovereignty of a province of America, to the south of Maryland. Thus was a Quaker raised to sovereign power.
He set sail for his new dominions with two ships filled with Quakers, who followed his fortune. The country was then named by them Pennsylvania, from William Penn; and he founded Philadelphia, which is now a very flourishing city. His first care was to make an alliance with his American neighbors; and this is the only treaty between those people and the Christians that was not ratified by an oath, and that was never infringed. The new sovereign also enacted several wise and wholesome laws for his colony, which have remained invariably the same to this day. The chief is, to ill-treat no person on account of religion, and to consider as brethren all those who believe in one God. He had no sooner settled his government than several American merchants came and peopled this colony. The natives of the country, instead of flying into the woods, cultivated by degrees a friendship with the peaceable Quakers. They loved these new strangers as much as they disliked the other Christians, who had conquered and ravaged America. In a little time these savages, as they are called, delighted with their new neighbors, flocked in crowds to Penn, to offer themselves as his vassals. It was an uncommon thing to behold a sovereign "thee'd" and "thou'd" by his subjects, and addressed by them with their hats on; and no less singular for a government to be without one priest in it; a people without arms, either for offence or preservation; a body of citizens without any distinctions but those of public employments; and for neighbors to live together free from envy or jealousy. In a word, William Penn might, with reason, boast of having brought down upon earth the Golden Age, which in all probability, never had any real existence but in his dominions.

Parting, Sea

“Only you can make sure the democracy you inherit is as good as we know it can be. But it requires your dedicated, informed, and engaged citizenship. This citizenship is a harder, higher road to take. But it leads to a better place.”

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

2013, Commencement Address at Ohio State University (May 2013)
Context: Only you can make sure the democracy you inherit is as good as we know it can be. But it requires your dedicated, informed, and engaged citizenship. This citizenship is a harder, higher road to take. But it leads to a better place. It is how we built this country – together. It is the question President Kennedy posed to the nation at his inauguration; the dream that Dr. King invoked. It does not promise easy success or immediate progress. But it has led to success, and it has led to progress.
That brings me to the second thing I ask of you – I ask you to persevere.

Democracy

“That commitment – that willingness to lay down their lives so we might inherit the blessings of this nation – is what we honor today. But on this Memorial Day, as on every day, we are called to honor their ultimate sacrifice with more than words. We are called to honor them with deeds. We are called to honor them by doing our part for the loved ones our fallen heroes have left behind and looking after our military families. By making sure the men and women serving this country around the world have the support they need to achieve their missions and come home safely. By making sure veterans have the care and assistance they need. In short, by serving all those who have ever worn the uniform of this country – and their families – as well as they have served us.”

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

2010, Weekly Address (May 29, 2010)

Love, Women, Men, World

“He could boast that he inherited it brick and left it marble.”

Augustus (-63–14 BC) founder of Julio-Claudian dynasty and first emperor of the Roman Empire

Suetonius, of Augustus and the city of Rome, in Lives of the Caesars, Divus Augustus, XXVIII, 3.

“The old palaces of the Tsars and the nobility have now become museums and rest-houses and sanatoria for the people… I suppose the old palaces now serve the purpose of children and young people. Children and the young are the favoured persons in Soviet land today, and they get the best of everything, even though others might suffer lack. It is for them that the present generation labours, for it is they who will inherit the socialised and scientific State, if that finally comes into existence in their time.”

Jawaharlal Nehru book Glimpses of World History

Glimpses of World History (1949)

Children, People, Suffering, Time

“We suffer not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from the incompleteness of that development. Alongside the modern evils, we are oppressed by a whole series of inherited evils, arising from the passive survival of archaic and outmoded modes of production, with their accompanying train of anachronistic social and political relations. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead. Le mort saisit le vif!”

Karl Marx book Das Kapital

Preface to the First Edition, Capital Volume 1, Peinguin Classics edition 1976.
Das Kapital (Buch I) (1867)

Suffering, Relation ships, Evil, Training

“Our religion and culture, our history and tradition, our social code and economic system, our laws of inheritance, succession and marriage are fundamentally different from those of most peoples living in the rest of India. The ideals which move our people to make the highest sacrifices are essentially different from those which inspire the Hindus to do the same. These differences are not confined to broad, basic principles. Far from it. They extend to the minutest details of our lives. We do not inter-dine; we do not inter-marry. Our national customs and calendars, even our diet and dress are different.”

Choudhry Rahmat Ali book Pakistan Declaration

28 January 1933, quoted in Now or Never; Are We to Live or Perish Forever? (Pakistan Declaration)
Ideology of Pakistan

Marriage, People, Making love, Religion

“William inherited very large possessions, part of which consisted of crown debts, due to the vice-admiral for sums he had advanced for the sea-service. No moneys were at that time less secure than those owing from the king. Penn was obliged to go, more than once, and "thee" and "thou" Charles and his ministers, to recover the debt; and at last, instead of specie, the government invested him with the right and sovereignty of a province of America, to the south of Maryland. Thus was a Quaker raised to sovereign power.
He set sail for his new dominions with two ships filled with Quakers, who followed his fortune. The country was then named by them Pennsylvania, from William Penn; and he founded Philadelphia, which is now a very flourishing city. His first care was to make an alliance with his American neighbors; and this is the only treaty between those people and the Christians that was not ratified by an oath, and that was never infringed. The new sovereign also enacted several wise and wholesome laws for his colony, which have remained invariably the same to this day. The chief is, to ill-treat no person on account of religion, and to consider as brethren all those who believe in one God. He had no sooner settled his government than several American merchants came and peopled this colony. The natives of the country, instead of flying into the woods, cultivated by degrees a friendship with the peaceable Quakers. They loved these new strangers as much as they disliked the other Christians, who had conquered and ravaged America. In a little time these savages, as they are called, delighted with their new neighbors, flocked in crowds to Penn, to offer themselves as his vassals. It was an uncommon thing to behold a sovereign "thee'd" and "thou'd" by his subjects, and addressed by them with their hats on; and no less singular for a government to be without one priest in it; a people without arms, either for offence or preservation; a body of citizens without any distinctions but those of public employments; and for neighbors to live together free from envy or jealousy. In a word, William Penn might, with reason, boast of having brought down upon earth the Golden Age, which in all probability, never had any real existence but in his dominions.”

Voltaire (1694–1778) French writer, historian, and philosopher

Love, Money, God, Friendship

“Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It is not uncommon for the voice to be a person's own worst enemy. Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease.”

Eckhart Tolle book The Power of Now

The Power of Now (1997)

People, Disease, History, Past

“It is good to meet and drink at the fountains of wisdom inherited from the founding fathers of the Republic.”

Warren G. Harding (1865–1923) American politician, 29th president of the United States (in office from 1921 to 1923)

1918 address to the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution.

Wisdom, Drink

“We women have presented larger petitions in support of our enfranchisement than were ever presented for any other reform; we have succeeded in holding greater public meetings than men have ever held for any reform, in spite of the difficulty which women have in throwing off their natural diffidence, that desire to escape publicity which we have inherited from generations of our foremothers. We have broken through that. We have faced hostile mobs at street corners, because we were told that we could not have that representation for our taxes that men have won unless we converted the whole of the country to our side. Because we have done this, we have been misrepresented, we have been ridiculed, we have had contempt poured upon us, and the ignorant mob have been incited to offer us violence, which we have faced unarmed and unprotected by the safeguards which Cabinet Ministers enjoy. We have been driven to do this; we are determined to go on with this agitation because we feel in honour bound. Just as it was the duty of your forefathers, it is our duty to make the world a better place for women than it is to-day.”

Emmeline Pankhurst book My Own Story

My Own Story (1914), Book II, Ch. 3

Women, Men, Hostility, World

“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.”

Henry David Thoreau book Walden ou la vie dans les bois

Source: Walden

Books, World, Wealth

“I wonder if you can refuse to inherit the world.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Source: The Essential Calvin and Hobbes: A Calvin and Hobbes Treasury

World

“… Illegitimate children can be left money, but they can't inherit the peerage."
"You wouldn't want it," Cameron put in. "More trouble than it's worth. And for God's sake, don't murder Hart or I'm next.”

Jennifer Ashley (1974) American author

Source: The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie

Money, God, Children

“In a world of change, the learners shall inherit the earth, while the learned shall find themselves perfectly suited for a world that no longer exists.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Section 32 
Reflections on the Human Condition (1973)
Variant: In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
Context: The central task of education is to implant a will and a facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.
In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.

World, Learning, Change

“I had an inheritance from my father,
It was the moon and the sun.
And though I roam all over the world,
The spending of it’s never done.”

Ernest Hemingway book For Whom the Bell Tolls

Source: For Whom the Bell Tolls

World, Sun

“History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what do do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.”

Jill Lepore (1966) American historian

Way, History

“No kid in the world, no woman in the world should ever raise a hand against a no-good daddy. That's already been taken care of: A Man Who Destroys His Own Home Shall Inherit the Wind.”

Dick Gregory (1932–2017) American comedian, social activist, social critic, writer, and entrepreneur

World, Home

“You inherit your environment just as much as your genes.”

Johnny Rich

The Human Script

“Any titles, money, or privilege you inherit are actually hindrances. They delude you into believing you are owed respect.”

Robert Greene (1959) American author

Money

“This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories. (p.237)”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

Source: Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

Marriage, Time

“I would rather make my name then inherit it.”

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) novelist

“Someone had to do something sometime. Every victim was a culprit, every culprit a victim, and somebody had to stand up sometime to try to break the lousy chain of inherited habit that was imperiling them all.”

Joseph Heller book Catch-22

Source: Catch-22

“Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them false courage to kill themselves, which automatically removes normal barriers to killing others. Dangerous because it teaches enmity to others labelled only by a difference of inherited tradition. And dangerous because we have all bought into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let's now stop being so damned respectful!”

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

When asked how the world had changed following the September 11, 2001 attacks <br class="br"> Has the world changed? http://books.guardian.co.uk/writersreflections/story/0,1367,567546,00.html, The Guardian (October 11, 2001)

People, Faith, Religion, Confidence

“You know that passage in the Bible that says, “And the meek shall inherit the Earth”? Always wondered if that was mistranslated. Perhaps it actually says, “And the geek shall inherit the Earth.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Source: Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier

“A man will find a single coin in the mud and talk about it for days, but when his inheritance comes and is accounted one percent less than he expected, then he will declare himself cheated.”

Brandon Sanderson book Words of Radiance

Source: Words of Radiance

Cheating

“Courage did not come from the need to survive, or from a brute indifference inherited from someone else, but from a driving need for love which no obstacle in this world or the next world will break.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

Love, World, Courage, Indifference

“You, as a food buyer, have the distinct privilege of proactively participating in shaping the world your children will inherit.”

Joel Salatin (1957) American environmentalist

Source: Holy Cows and Hog Heaven: The Food Buyer's Guide to Farm Friendly Food

Children, World, Food

““You can hardly blame them.”
“Assuming stupidity is an inherited trait, then no, I can’t.””

Alastair Reynolds book Revelation Space

Source: Revelation Space (2000), Chapter 3 (p. 67).

Stupidity

“Flora inherited, however, from her father a strong will and from her mother a slender ankle. The one had not been impaired by always having her own way nor the other by the violent athletic sports in which she had been compelled to take part, but she realized that neither was adequate as an equipment for earning her keep.”

Stella Gibbons book Cold Comfort Farm

Source: Cold Comfort Farm (1932), Chapter 1.

Way, Sport, Strong, Parting

“We say: he has no talent, only tone. But tone is precisely what cannot be invented — we're born with it. Tone is an inherited grace, the privilege some of us have of making our organic pulsations felt — tone is more than talent, it is its essence.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.”

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

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 98

Personality

“The division of distinctive social roles and tasks, based upon both inherited and socially acquired individual differences, is called social differentiation.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Class and society (1959), p. 4.

“However extensively Lenin was prepared to creatively develop the Marxism he inherited, he was not prepared to ‘skip stages’ in achieving socialism. Socialism required, as prerequisite, the modernization and industrial development of its economic base. To create the missing material prerequisites, Lenin was prepared to fall back on a centrally supervised market-influenced program of state capitalism.”

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

Source: Marxism, Fascism & Totalitarianism: Chapters in the Intellectual History of Radicalism, (2008), p. 56

“In pre-war correspondence, Lee castigated the abolitionists for their political activity, and he never showed any qualms about the social order that he would later defend with arms. He also had a few slaves that he inherited as part of a will agreement, with provisions to emancipate those slaves. But in fact, he dragged his heels in complying with the terms of that will. And he never gave a second thought to the fact that his beloved Arlington mansion was run by slave labor.”

Brooks D. Simpson (1957) American historian

2000s, Intelligence Report: Rebels With A Cause (2000)

War, Parting

“I have been studying inherited susceptibility of cancer through affected families. The goal is to identify genes that are involved in cancer development.”

Frederick Pei Li (1940–2015) American physician

Whonamedit - dictionary of medical eponyms http://www.whonamedit.com/doctor.cfm/2249.html.

Family, Study

“I felt there’s a wealth in Jewish tradition, a great inheritance. I’d be a jerk not to take advantage of it.”

Herman Wouk (1915–2019) Pulitzer Prize-winning American author whose novels include The Caine Mutiny, The Winds of War and War and …

On his return to Orthodox Judaism.
Time Magazine (September 5, 1955).

Jerk, Wealth

“You cannot take the world through inheritance and boasting, you can take it only by wielding the sword in battle.”

Iltutmish (1210–1236) Sultan of Mamluk Sultanate

Iltumish. Isami, II, 221. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1994). Muslim slave system in medieval India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 4

World

“What is to be the nature of the domestic legislation of the future? (Hear, hear.) I cannot help thinking that it will be more directed to what are called social subjects than has hitherto been the case.—How to promote the greater happiness of the masses of the people (hear, hear), how to increase their enjoyment of life (cheers), that is the problem of the future; and just as there are politicians who would occupy all the world and leave nothing for the ambition of anybody else, so we have their counterpart at home in the men who, having already annexed everything that is worth having, expect everybody else to be content with the crumbs that fall from their table. If you will go back to the origin of things you will find that when our social arrangements first began to shape themselves every man was born into the world with natural rights, with a right to a share in the great inheritance of the community, with a right to a part of the land of his birth. (Cheers.) But all these rights have passed away. The common rights of ownership have disappeared. Some of them have been sold; some of them have been given away by people who had no right to dispose of them; some of them have been lost through apathy and ignorance; some have been stolen by fraud (cheers); and some have been acquired by violence. Private ownership has taken the place of these communal rights, and this system has become so interwoven with our habits and usages, it has been so sanctioned by law and protected by custom, that it might be very difficult and perhaps impossible to reverse it. But then, I ask, what ransom will property pay for the security which it enjoys? What substitute will it find for the natural rights which have ceased to be recognized?”

Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914) British businessman, politician, and statesman

Speech to the Birmingham Artisans' Association at Birmingham Town Hall (5 January 1885), quoted in ‘Mr. Chamberlain At Birmingham.’, The Times (6 January 1885), p. 7.
1880s

Life, Men, Happiness, People

“I'm known for speaking my mind, a trait I probably inherited from my parents, Louis and Mary Leakey—neither of whom was renowned for tact.”

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

Wildlife Wars: My Fight to Save Africa's Natural Treasures (2001) with Virginia Morell

Parent

“Love is what we learn on the brink,
after we've archived all our inherited
and acquired science. Love begins late.”

Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902–1987) Brazilian poet

Amor é o que se aprende no limite,
depois de se arquivar toda a ciência
herdada, ouvida. Amor começa tarde.
"Amor e seu tempo" ["The Time of Love"]
As Impurezas do Branco [Impurities of White] (1973)

Love, Learning, Science

“Increasingly constructive doubt is the sign of advancing civilization. We must put question marks along many of our inherited legal dogmas, since they are dangerously out of line with social facts.”

Jerome Frank (1889–1957) American jurist

Page 159.
Law and the Modern Mind (1930)

Question

“The stream of time sweeps away errors, and leaves the truth for the inheritance of humanity.”

Georg Brandes (1842–1927) Danish literature critic and scholar

Ferdinand Lassalle (1881)

Truth, Error, Time

“The usage of the words “public" and “public sphere” betrays a multiplicity of concurrent meanings. Their origins go back to various historical phases and, when applied synchronically to the conditions of a bourgeois society that is industrially advanced and constituted as a social-welfare state, they fuse into a clouded amalgam. Yet the very conditions that make the inherited language seem inappropriate appear to require these words, however confused their employment.”

Jürgen Habermas book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

Source: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 1963/1991, p. 1 as cited in: Gandy, M (1997) "Ecology, modernity and the intellectual legacy of the Frankfurt School". In: Light, A and Smith, JM, (eds.) Space, Place and Environmental Ethics. p. 240

Appearance

“The categories within which the colonists thought about the social foundations of politics were inheritances from classical antiquity, reshaped by seventeenth century English thought.”

Bernard Bailyn book The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), Chapter VI, THE CONTAGION OF LIBERTY, p. 273.

“Say not you know another entirely, till you have divided an inheritance with him.”

Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801) Swiss poet

No. 157
Aphorisms on Man (c. 1788)

“Leaders are stewards. They understand the proverb, "We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children."”

Kent Thiry (1956) Business; CEO of DaVita

University of Colorado Leeds School of Business Commencement Address (2013)

Children, Understanding

“Don’t just accept the world you inherit today. Don’t just accept the status quo. No big challenge has ever been solved, and no lasting improvement has ever been achieved, unless people dare to try something different. Dare to think different.”

Tim Cook (1960) American business executive

Entrepreneur: "From Oprah Winfrey to Tim Cook, Leaders Offer Gems of Wisdom to the Class of 2018" https://www.entrepreneur.com/slideshow/313917 (24 May 2018)

People, World, Thinking