Ancestor Quotes - Page 11

• A wealth of knowledge is openly accessible in nature. Our ancestors knew this and embraced the natural cures found in the bosoms of the earth. Their classroom was nature. They studied the lessons to be learned from animals, knowing that much of human behavior can be explained by watching the wild beasts around us. Animals are constantly teaching us things about ourselves and the way of the universe, but most people are too blind to watch and listen.

  Suzy Kassem

  Teaching, Animal, Wealth Of Knowledge

  "Rise Up and Salute the Sun". Book by Suzy Kassem, 2010.

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• What is birth to a man if it shall be a stain to his dead ancestors to have left such an offspring?

  Philip Sidney

  Men, Ancestry, Birth

  Sir Philip Sidney, Jane Porter (1807). “Aphorisms of Sir Philip Sidney: With Remarks”, p.3

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• Even while Jerusalem was standing and the Jews were at peace with us, the practice of their sacred rites was at variance with the glory of our empire, the dignity of our name, the customs of our ancestors.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Practice, Names, Jerusalem

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• It's like we're suffering from an identity crisis, and that identity is in our arts and the fact that we don't find it chief amongst our agendas to teach our kids who we are as a nation and the battles we've had on this ground and how they've been successfully resolved. We can't enjoy the fruits of the labor of our ancestors.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Art, Kids, Suffering

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• You'd better stay determined, because that's how our ancestors got us where we are.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Determined

  "The March on Washington: 50th Anniversary – Marian Wright Edelman & Dr. Mary Frances Berry". "The Tavis Smiley Show", www.pbs.org. August 27, 2013.

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• A man is the sum of his ancestors; to reform him you must begin with a dead ape and work downward through a million graves.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Men, Apes, Reform

  Ambrose Bierce (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)”, p.1216, Delphi Classics

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• I set out with a perfect distrust of my own abilities, a total renunciation of every speculation of my own, and with a profound reverence for the wisdom of our ancestors, who have left us the inheritance of so happy a Constitution and so flourishing an empire, and, what is a thousand times more valuable, the treasury of the maxims and principles which formed the one and obtained the other.

  Edmund Burke

  Profound, Perfect, Principles

  Edmund Burke (1852). “The Works and Correspondence of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke”, p.269

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• Our spirit of life is not identical with that of our ancestors, and therefore their music, even if restored with utter technical perfections, can never have to us precisely the same meaning it had for them. We cannot tear down the barricade that separates the present world from things and deeds past.

  Paul Hindemith

  Past, Perfection, Tears

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• Honor, justice, and humanity, call upon us to hold, and to transmit to our posterity, that liberty which we received from our ancestors. It is not our duty to leave wealth to our children, but it is our duty to leave liberty to them.

  John Dickinson

  Children, Justice, Humanity

  "A Library of American Literature From the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time". Book by Edmund Clarence Stedman, Volume 3, 'A Duty to Posterity' (pp. 177-178), 1892.

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• Our Phoenician ancestors never left anything they undertook unfinished. Consider what they accomplished in their days, and the degree of culture they attained.

  Ameen Rihani

  Degrees, Culture, Unfinished

  Ameen Rihani (2012). “The Book of Khalid”, p.131, Melville House

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• Liberty is the first condition of growth. Your ancestors gave every liberty to the soul, and religion grew. They put the body under every bondage, and society did not grow. The opposite is the case in the West - every liberty to society, none to religion. Now are falling off the shackles from the feet of Eastern society as from those of Western religion.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Fall, Feet, Opposites

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.1992, Manonmani Publishers

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• Man is the child of customs, not the child of his ancestors.

  Ibn Khaldun

  Children, Men, Customs

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• It is highly probable that the bulk of the Jew's ancestors 'never' lived in Palestine 'at all,' which witnesses the power of historical assertion over fact.

  H. G. Wells

  Historical, Facts, Palestine

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• A lot of indigenous cultures are deeply involved in working with ancestor spirits, elemental spirits, and demons. Many of these cultures feel that, if you don't deal properly with ancestor spirits, then they come back and infest the living in the form of things like depression, addictive patterns, and neuroses. We in the modern West completely deny the existence of these spirits or other types of entities. And because we've denied them, we may have opened the gates for them to manipulate us in a lot of ways.

  Daniel Pinchbeck

  Culture, May, Neurosis

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Your ancestors dragged these black people from their homes by force; and in the white man's quest for wealth and an easy life they have been ruthlessly suppressed and exploited, degraded into slavery. The modern prejudice against Negroes is the result of the desire to maintain this unworthy condition.

  Albert Einstein

  Home, Men, White

  Albert Einstein (2011). “Out of My Later Years: The Scientist, Philosopher, and Man Portrayed Through His Own Words”, p.37, Open Road Media

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• Why is it that, despite having achieved previously undreamed-of miracles of progress, we seem more helpless in facing life than our less privileged ancestors were? The answer seems clear: while humankind collectively has increased its material powers a thousandfold, it has not advanced very far in terms of improving the content of experience.

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

  Miracle, Progress, Answers

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• The forces of genetic mixing are so powerful that everyone in the world has Jewish ancestors, though the amount of DNA from those ancestors in a given individual may be small. In fact, everyone on earth is by now a descendant of Abraham, Moses, and Aaron--if indeed they existed.

  Steve Olson

  Powerful, Dna, Mixing

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• Baseball, more than any other sport, has a magical way of connecting fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, grandparents and grandchildren and ancestors back down the line. - From The Brooklyn Nine

  Alan Gratz

  Sports, Baseball, Daughter

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• You know that the population is of this planet is now ten times greater than it was in the ages preceding capitalism.; you know that all men today enjoy a higher standard of living than your ancestors did before the age of capitalism. But how do you know that you are the one out of ten who would have lived in the absence of capitalism? The mere fact that you are living today is proof that capitalism has succeeded, whether or not you consider your own life very valuable.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Men, Age, Facts

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• I'd rather have an ape for an ancestor than a bishop.

  Thomas Huxley

  Bishops, Apes

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• I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors.

  Barack Obama

  Grateful, Sacrifice, Today

  First Presidential Inaugural Address, Delivered 20 January 2009

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• As to the fable that there are Antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite side of the earth where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours, that is on no ground credible. Even if some unknown landmass is there, and not just ocean, there was only one pair of original ancestors, and it is inconceivable that such distant regions should have been peopled by Adam's descendants.

  Saint Augustine

  Ocean, Men, Feet

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• Your ancestors came to Macedonia and the rest of Hellas [Greece] and did us great harm, though we had done them no prior injury. I have been appointed leader of the Greeks, and wanting to punish the Persians I have come to Asia, which I took from you.

  Alexander the Great

  Army, Leader, Greek

  "Anabasis of Alexander" by Arrian of Nicomedia, translated by P. A. Brunt. Books I-IV,

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• Then he is a monster!" the Prince crowed, "and I must slay him at once. The Formula works!" "Your Formula must result in a great deal of fighting," I mused. "Oh, yes, when applied correctly mighty and noble battles result! Of course I always win—the value of Prince X is a constant. It cannot be lesser than that of Monster Y—this is the Moral Superiority Hypothesis made famous five hundred years ago by my ancestor Ethelred, the Mathematician-King. We have never seen his equal, in all these centuries.

  Catherynne M. Valente

  Kings, Fighting, Winning

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• Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating. And the oceans are above me here, rolling clouds, heavy and dark. It is winter and there is smoke from the fires. It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.

  Linda Hogan

  Ocean, Dark, Winter

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