Ancestor Quotes - Page 10

• Jews have always yearned for Jerusalem, from which they'd been exiled many times, but they also yearned for each and every one of the countries where they had been persecuted and where their ancestors once lived and are still buried.

  Phyllis Chesler

  Country, Jerusalem, Buried

  Phyllis Chesler (2013). “An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir”, p.145, Macmillan

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• Some of the very heroic and colourful figures in our history are sons of Sabaragamuwa - Parakramabahu I, born in Dedigama, the warrior King Rajasinghe I also known as Sitawaka Rajasingha, Edirille Rala born in Colombo and baptised Domingo Corea, who returned to the village of his ancestors Atulugama near Sitawaka and turned against the Portuguese.

  Dominicus Corea

  Kings, Warrior, Son

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• Creeds and causal systems have argued with each other for millennia, and even so we and our ancestors have managed to live in a world of differing opinions. Philosophical disputes don't often affect the price of fish or wine.

  Elizabeth Janeway

  Philosophical, Wine, World

  Elizabeth Janeway (1987). “Improper behavior”, William Morrow

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• Some persons believe everything that their kindred, their parents, and their tutors believe. The veneration and the love which they have for their ancestors incline them to swallow down all their opinions at once, without examining what truth or falsehood there is in them. Men take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.

  Isaac Watts

  Believe, Men, Parent

  Isaac Watts (1806). “Logic, Or The Right Use of Reason in the Inquiry After Truth: With a Variety of Rules to Guard Against Error in the Affairs of Religion and Human Life, as Well as in the Sciences”, p.174

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• A people who still remembered that their ancestors had been the masters of the world would have applauded, with conscious pride, the representation of ancient freedom, if they had not long since been accustomed to prefer the solid assurance of bread to the unsubstantial visions of liberty and greatness.

  Edward Gibbon

  Pride, Greatness, Long

  Edward Gibbon (1820). “The history of the decline and fall of the Roman empire”, p.165

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• If centralism is ultimately to prevail; if our entire system of free Institutions as established by our common ancestors is to be subverted, and an Empire is to be established in their stead; if that is to be the last scene of the great tragic drama now being enacted: then, be assured, that we of the South will be acquitted, not only in our own consciences, but in the judgment of mankind, of all responsibility for so terrible a catastrophe, and from all guilt of so great a crime against humanity.

  Alexander H. Stephens

  Drama, Responsibility, Humanity

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• Madness, provided it comes as the gift of heaven, is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings... the men of old who gave things their names saw no disgrace or reproach in madness; otherwise they would not have connected it with the name of the noblest of arts, the art of discerning the future, and called it the manic art... So, according to the evidence provided by our ancestors, madness is a nobler thing than sober sense... madness comes from God, whereas sober sense is merely human.

  Plato

  Art, Blessing, Men

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• Chinese culture in general is not very religious. Confucianism is more a code of ethics than a religion, and ancestor worship is a way for parents to control you even after theyre dead.

  David Henry Hwang

  Religious, Parent, Chinese

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• Blind impatience is equally evident in the fruit section. Our ancestors might have delighted in the occasional handful of berries found on the underside of a bush in late summer, viewing it as a sign of the unexpected munificence of a divine creator, but we became modern when we gave up on awaiting sporadic gifts from above and sought to render any pleasing sensation immediately and repeatedly available.

  Alain de Botton

  Summer, Berries, Might

  Alain de Botton (2009). “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work”, p.27, Penguin UK

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• It has been argued that dinosaurs did not die out, but just evolved wings and flew away. At a certain level, this reasoning is sound.... Birds, as a group, did descend from dinosaurs and ... all 8,600 species of birds living today carry some inheritance from their reptilian ancestors.

  David M. Raup

  Wings, Bird, Today

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• Textbooks describe DNA as a blueprint for a body. It's better seen as a recipe for making a body, because it is irreversible. But today I want to present it as something different again, and even more intriguing. The DNA in you is a coded description of ancient worlds in which your ancestors lived. DNA is the wisdom out of the old days, and I mean very old days indeed.

  Richard Dawkins

  Wisdom, Mean, Dna

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• When we look at things as simple as food, it's not about just nourishment and sustaining our life, it is really the seed of our ancestor.

  Maya Tiwari

  Simple, Looks, Sustaining

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• Our ancestors are an ever widening circle of hope.

  Toni Morrison

  Circles, Roots

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• As for major obstacles keeping young Latinos from becoming filmmakers, I think our communities are still coming into their identities as storytellers. It's such an important identity to reclaim - it's how our ancestors kept our cultures alive. But a long history of silencing, invisibility, and marginalization has kept generations of Latinos from believing in themselves, from seeing themselves as agents of their own lives. I think there needs to be a focus on this aspect to help cultivate young Latinas to see themselves as cultural producers and defenders.

  Aurora Guerrero

  Believe, Thinking, Long

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time.

  Garrison Keillor

  Law, America, England

  Quoted in N.Y. Times, 30 Mar. 1990

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• The improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man's existence: as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Men, Skeletons, Law

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.10, Simon and Schuster

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• The dog that buried the bone which even a canine appetite could not manage, the squirrel that gathered nuts for a later feast, the bees that filled the comb with honey, the ants that laid up stores for a rainy day - these were among the first creators of civilization. It was they....who taught our ancestors the art of providing for tomorrow out of the surplus of today, or of preparing for winter in summer's time of plenty.

  Will Durant

  Summer, Dog, Art

  Will Durant (2011). “Our Oriental Heritage: The Story of Civilization”, p.60, Simon and Schuster

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• If during their education our youths become alienated from their language, history, ancestors, culture and civilization, it means there is a very serious educational problem there.

  Recep Tayyip Erdogan

  Education, Mean, Civilization

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• My patriotism is of the kind which is outraged by the notion that the United States never was a great nation until in a petty three months' campaign it knocked to pieces a poor, decrepit, bankrupt old state like Spain. To hold such an opinion as that is to abandon all American standards, to put shame and scorn on all that our ancestors tried to build up here, and to go over to the standards of which Spain is a representative.

  William Graham Sumner

  Three, Campaigns, Pieces

  William Graham Sumner (1919). “War and Other Essays”

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• Because the newer methods of treatment are good, it does not follow that the old ones were bad: for if our honorable and worshipful ancestors had not recovered from their ailments, you and I would not be here today.

  Confucius

  Doe, Today, Treatment

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• Writing is one thing and knowledge is another. Writing is the photographing of knowledge, but it is not knowledge itself. Knowledge is a light which is within man. It is the heritage of all the ancestors knew and have transmitted to us as seed, just as the mature baobab is contained in its seed.

  Amadou Hampate Ba

  Writing, Men, Light

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• WEATHER, n. The climate of an hour. A permanent topic of conversation among persons whom it does not interest, but who have inherited the tendency to chatter about it from naked arboreal ancestors whom it keenly concerned. The setting up of official weather bureaus and their maintenance in mendacity prove that even governments are accessible to suasion by the rude forefathers of the jungle.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Weather, Government, Rude

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.232, 谷月社

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• If manufacturers are so sure there is nothing wrong with genetically modified foods, pesticides and cloned meats, they should have no problems labeling them as such. After all, cancer will kill one in every two men and one in every three women now alive, reports Samuel Epstein, chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition. Like our ancestors, we act in ways that will bemuse future societies. The military-industrial complex lubricates the mass-agriculture system with fossil fuels. Tons of heavy metals and other hazardous, even radioactive, waste is sprayed on American agricultural soil.

  Adam Gollner

  Military, Cancer, Men

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• Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors.

  William James

  War, Men, Glory

  William James (2016). “William James: Essays and Lectures”, p.275, Routledge

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• Hey, this is Europe. We took it from nobody; we won it from the bare soil that the ice left. The bones of our ancestors, and the stones of their works, are everywhere. Our liberties were won in wars and revolutions so terrible that we do not fear our governors: they fear us. Our children giggle and eat ice-cream in the palaces of past rulers. We snap our fingers at kings. We laugh at popes. When we have built up tyrants, we have brought them down. And we have nuclear ********* weapons.

  Ken MacLeod

  Country, Kings, Children

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