Ancestor Quotes - Page 26

• And that's how we measure out our real respect for people—by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate—and enjoy. End of sermon. As Buddha says: live like a mighty river. And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your ancestors were living again through you.

  Ted Hughes

  Real, Rivers, People

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• This is a beautiful and hopeful time to be alive. We are at a turning point, and your contribution to the world is needed more than ever. All of your struggles, all the struggles of your ancestors, all the struggles of all life have led to this moment right now. You are the culmination of life's great yearning; you are the hope of the world.

  Ilchi Lee

  Beautiful, Struggle, Hopeful

  FaceBook post by Ilchi Lee from Jul 13, 2014

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• Light is the only connection we have with the Universe beyond our solar system, and the only connection our ancestors had with anything beyond Earth. Follow the light and we can journey from the confines of our planet to other worlds that orbit the Sun without ever dreaming of spacecraft. To look up is to look back in time, because the ancient beams of light are messengers from the Universe's distant past.

  Brian Cox

  Dream, Past, Journey

  Professor Brian Cox, Andrew Cohen (2011). “Wonders of the Universe”, p.22, HarperCollins UK

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• Whatever my ancestors did to you, none of them consulted me.

  Tad Williams

  Tad Williams (2010). “Shadowrise: Volume Three of Shadowmarch”, p.524, Penguin

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• Faith is indispensable, and the world at times does not seem to have quite enough of it. It can and has accomplished what seems to be the impossible. Wars have been started and men and nations lost for the lack of it. Faith starts from the individual and builds men and nations. America was built by and on the faith of our ancestors.

  Carl Sandburg

  Faith, War, Men

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• We were kids without fathers, so we found our fathers on wax and on the streets and in history, and in a way, that was a gift. We got to pick and choose the ancestors who would inspire the world we were going to make for ourselves.

  Jay-Z

  Father, Kids, Inspire

  Jay-Z (2010). “Decoded (Enhanced Edition)”, p.271, Random House Group

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• In the history of the world the Vedas fill a gap which no literary work in any other language could fill. I maintain that to everybody who cares for himself for his ancestors for his intellectual development a study of the Vedic literature is indeed indispensable.

  Max Muller

  Intellectual, Vedas, Who Cares

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• In our prehistoric past, we would have lived in extended families, surrounded by kin whose interests we might have wanted to promote because they shared our genes. Now we live in big cities. We are not among kin nor people who will ever reciprocate our good deeds. It doesn't matter. Just as people engaged in sex with contraception are not aware of being motivated by a drive to have babies, it doesn't cross our mind that the reason for do-gooding is based in the fact that our primitive ancestors lived in small groups.

  Richard Dawkins

  Baby, Sex, Past

  Source: inters.org

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• [Opetaia Foa'i] brought in the melody and the lyrics, but the lyrics were in Tokelauan, and so, we talked about what it could mean and whether this could be the ancestor song. So, I started writing English lyrics to sort of the same melody.

  Lin-Manuel Miranda

  Song, Writing, Mean

  Source: deadline.com

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• My ancestors were all Freethinkers, formerly Catholics. It was science and Darwin, in particular, that made them decide, as educated people, which they were, that the priest, nice as he was, didn't know what he was talking about.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Nice, Talking, People

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• Evolutionary biologists often appeal to parsimony when they seek to explain why organisms "match" with respect to a given trait. For example, why do almost all the organisms that are alive today on our planet use the same genetic code? If they share a common ancestor, the code could have evolved just once and then been inherited from the most recent common ancestor that present organisms share. On the other hand, if organisms in different species share no common ancestors, the code must have evolved repeatedly.

  Elliott Sober

  Hands, Live For Today, Example

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• My ancestors came over from Germany about the time of the Civil War and one of them lost a leg and went back to Germany.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  War, Germany, Legs

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• The US is also unusual in the enormous scale of religious fundamentalism. The impact on understanding of the world is extraordinary. In national polls almost half of those surveyed have reported that they believe that God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago (or less) and that man shares no common ancestor with the ape. There are similar beliefs about the Second Coming.

  Noam Chomsky

  Religious, Believe, Men

  "Global Warming and the Future of Humanity: An Interview With Noam Chomsky and Graciela Chichilnisky". Interview with C.J. Polychroniou, www.truth-out.org. September 17, 2016.

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• It all began when... they're funny, those words. Everyone uses them, without thinking what they mean. When does anything begin? With everyone it begins when you're born. Or before that, when your parents got married. Or before that, when your parents were born. Or when your ancestors colonised the place. Or when humans came squishing out of the mud and slime, dropped off their flippers and fins, and started to walk. But all the same, all that aside, for what's happened to us there was quite a definite beginning

  John Marsden

  Mean, Thinking, Parent

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• I'd always wanted to believe that my ancestors were better people than they probably were. - Princess Emma

  E.D. Baker

  Believe, Princess, People

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• Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Air, Apples, Outcomes

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History”, p.254, W. W. Norton & Company

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• People who can comfort the dead can also chase after them to hurt them further-a reverse ancestor worship.

  Maxine Hong Kingston

  Hurt, People, Comfort

  Maxine Hong Kingston (2014). “The Woman Warrior: Picador Classic”, p.17, Pan Macmillan

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• Maybe she'd seen too many Japanese horror movies, and maybe it was just a tingle of warning from generations of superstitious ancestors, but suddenly she knew that what Alyssa wanted was not to be saved, but for Shane to join her. In death.

  Rachel Caine

  Generations, Warning, Horror

  Rachel Caine (2012). “Bitter Blood: The Morganville Vampires”, p.125, Penguin

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• Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Years, Cities, Rivers

  Mohsin Hamid (2007). “The Reluctant Fundamentalist”, p.34, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• When we respond to threats immediately and take action right away, it's usually the threats that we're hard-wired to respond to, the kinds of things that our ancestors survived.

  Al Gore

  Action, Kind, Threat

  Interview with Andrea Mitchell, www.nbcnews.com. 2013.

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• It is curious how there seems to be an instinctive disgust in Man for his nearest ancestors and relations. If only Darwin could conscientiously have traced man back to the Elephant or the Lion or the Antelope, how much ridicule and prejudice would have been spared to the doctrine of Evolution.

  Havelock Ellis

  Men, Elephants, Atheism

  Havelock Ellis (1915). “Impressions and comments”

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• Some people don't mind a little constitutional sophistry in a good cause; and for liberals, centralizing all power in the federal government is always a good cause. Since most Americans don't know or care what the Constitution says, let alone what their ancestors thought it meant, the great liberal snow job has been very successful.

  Joseph Sobran

  Jobs, Successful, Government

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• Don't eat anything your great-great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. There are a great many food-like items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn't recognize as food.. stay away from these

  Michael Pollan

  Health, Grandmother, Nutrition

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• I can see why many Southerners, black ones in particular, don't like the implication that Southernness and the Confederate heritage are one and the same, because they're not. On the other hand, there are people who want to extirpate that completely and want folks to spit on the graves of their ancestors.

  John Shelton Reed

  Hands, People, Black

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• For nearly 2 million years, our ancestors survived and thrived and spread across the planet because they could run other mammals into heat exhaustion.

  Christopher McDougall

  Running, Years, Mammals

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