Ancestor Quotes - Page 27

• Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted. Spicy court-memoirs, the lives of gallant ladies, recollections of an ex-nun, a monk's confession, an atheist's repentance, true-to-life accounts of prostitution and bastardy gave our ancestors a penny peep into the forbidden room.

  Mary McCarthy

  Atheist, Eye, True Life

  Mary McCarthy (2002). “A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays”, New York Review of Books

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• When we respect our blood ancestors and our spiritual ancestors, we feel rooted. If we find ways to cherish and develop our spiritual heritage, we will avoid the kind of alienation that is destroying society, and we will become whole again. ... Learning to touch deeply the jewels of our own tradition will allow us to understand and appreciate the values of other traditions, and this will benefit everyone.

  Nhat Hanh

  Spiritual, Blood, Jewels

  6 Copy quote

• Your brain has a music room, and evolution would not have gone to the trouble of designing that if it didn't have some benefits. So, that suggests to me that we and our ancestors have had music as a central part of our experience for eons. And we're just beginning to understand how that might be. I think that's fascinating.

  Renee Fleming

  Thinking, Design, Brain

  Source: www.npr.org

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• We still are America though. We're still a country that is a country of social mobility. We're still a country of immigrants. We're still a country with common ancestors. And reviving the civics of America and the idea that we're going to be united, at least not right now, but in some common future, and talking in that hopeful way that Martin Luther King did, that Abraham Lincoln did, seems to me that's the way.

  David Brooks

  Country, Hopeful, Common

  Source: www.nbcnews.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Human emotions are a gift from our animal ancestors. Cruelty is a gift humanity has given itself.

  Thomas Harris

  Animal, Humanity, Emotion

  "Fictional character: Dr. Hannibal Lecter". TV Series "Hannibal" ("Coquilles", 2013), www.imdb.com. 2013–2015.

  117 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is an obvious evolutionary explanation for the scarcity of altruistic saints: Without a strong predilection for their own interests, our ancestors would have been unlikely to survive, reproduce, and give their own offspring a chance of doing the same. Now conditions have changed and for most of us, surviving and reproducing isn't such a struggle but we still carry the genes of our ancestors and they influence - not determine, but influence - our behavior.

  Peter Singer

  Strong, Struggle, Giving

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Healthy areas that are richest in information are those areas in the wild where we can get all the information that's available to us within our human hearing range. The most valuable information throughout human evolution has been faint sounds. We tend to think in our modern world that if it's loud, if it grabs our attention, it's important. We get a lot of that in advertising. But in nature, it's the faintest sound that's important; it has determined, in the past of our ancestors, perhaps, if they will live or die. Faint sounds are the earliest clues of newly arriving information.

  Gordon Hempton

  Thinking, Past, Healthy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Hijras earn a living by egging, sex work, badhai or blessing. There are now transgenders in social work, the fashion industry, who have PhDs. I say, "Study, study, study." You need not wear a sari, and even our ancestors said you need not wear feminine attire to be part of the third gender. When I started bar dancing, nobody else was doing it. When I joined the social sector in 1999, there were no nonprofit organizations working for the rights of hijras in India. But I had to do it, I wanted my dignity.

  Laxmi Narayan Tripathi

  Fashion, Blessing, Dancing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I believe that our distant nomadic ancestors came forward and survived because they could hear distant, faint birdsong as an acoustic navigational beacon, if you will, and by moving toward the birdsong, they were able to find places with shelter, food, and water, and a prosperous growing region. Indeed, birdsong is the number one indicator of habitats prosperous to humans.

  Gordon Hempton

  Believe, Moving, Water

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Our ancestors worshipped the Sun, and they were not that foolish. It makes sense to revere the Sun and the stars, for we are their children.

  Carl Sagan

  Stars, Children, Sun

  70 Copy quote

• We have landowners, small growers. We have people who are holding onto land that was acquired by their families after slavery. They need to produce some of the food we eat, so they can pay the taxes and hold onto the property. Taxes keep going up. We, and by we I mean black people, are rapidly becoming a landless people. Our ancestors, coming out of slavery, acquired more than 15 million acres of land. Today, we're probably down to less than 2 million acres.

  Shirley Sherrod

  Mean, People, Black

  Source: aalbc.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The songs of our ancestors are also the songs of our children

  Philip Carr-Gomm

  Song, Children, Our Children

  45 Copy quote

• I'm a big believer in the collective unconscious. The idea that there is a deep connection between all of us that goes back to our ancestors and forward to the people who will come after us. It's essentially the job of the artist to anchor that nebulous space, and I think that's what a writer does: goes to that strange place and brings back these little trinkets. The unspoken experience percolated throughout the generations allows you to have knowledge of things you wouldn't know first hand.

  Miroslav Penkov

  Artist, Thinking, People

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• What we've inherited from our ancestors has never existed to this extent before. And if we fail to preserve it, it will never, ever exist again. So we cannot fail.

  Donald Trump

  Failing

  Source: www.cnn.com

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Opera contains music that reflects a culture of poetry and aesthetic. Spirituals are no different. What separates a spiritual for me is that I also happen to love Jesus. When I'm approaching these songs, I'm not approaching them like Mozart. I see my faith and the struggle of my ancestors and of a people seeking freedom beside what these songs are going to be in terms of their arrangement and delivery.

  Measha Brueggergosman

  Spiritual, Song, Jesus

  Source: www.macleans.ca

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people.

  Nhat Hanh

  Life, Family, Spiritual

  Thich Nhat Hanh (2008). “Present Moment Wonderful Moment: Mindfulness Verses for Daily Living: Easyread Large Bold Edition”, p.80, ReadHowYouWant.com

  71 Copy quote

  Show source

• Thousand years ago, we all descended from Africans who left the continent. Those ancestors, we will never know their name. We can go back 200 or 300 years and actually populate your family tree with real people who had names and documents. They had customs, characteristics that, unbeknownst to you, you have inherited. Almost through osmosis it has been passed down to you.

  Henry Louis Gates

  Real, Years, Osmosis

  "Black Ancestry Matters on 'Finding Your Roots'". Interview with Alexandra Phanor-Faury, www.ebony.com. January 26, 2016.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The current generation now sees everything clearly, it marvels at the errors, it laughs at the folly of its ancestors, not seeing that this chronicle is all overscored by divine fire, that every letter of it cries out, that from everywhere the piercing finger is pointed at it, at this current generation; but the current generation laughs and presumptuously, proudly begins a series of new errors, at which their descendants will also laugh afterwards.

  Nikolai Gogol

  Fire, Errors, Laughing

  Nikolai Gogol (2011). “Dead Souls: A Novel”, p.215, Vintage

  67 Copy quote

  Show source

• Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs — in time, in space, and in potential — the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.

  Carl Sagan

  Space, Overcoming, Tiny

  Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan (2011). “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space”, p.73, Ballantine Books

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.

  Joshua

  Land, Lord, Family Bible

  47 Copy quote

• Our ancestors had displayed great strengths in space science. What people like Aryabhata had said centuries ago are being recognised by science today. We are a country which had these capabilities. We need to regain them.

  Narendra Modi

  Country, Motivation, Space

  4 Copy quote

• The Bible is a human product: it tells us how our religious ancestors saw things, not how God sees things

  Marcus Borg

  Religious, Saws, Humans

  Marcus Borg (2014). “Convictions: A manifesto for progressive Christians”, p.81, SPCK

  76 Copy quote

  Show source

• Contrary to Piketty’s rentier hypothesis, I don’t see anyone on the [Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans] whose ancestors bought a great parcel of land in 1780 and have been accumulating family wealth by collecting rents ever since. In America, that old money is long gone - through instability, inflation, taxes, philanthropy, and spending.

  Bill Gates

  America, Land, Long

  7 Copy quote

• Real knowing comes up when we stand in the appropriate place. But usually we don’t. First we want to understand something according to individual knowledge, prejudice, customs and habits. This means we are standing up in our individual place, not the universal perspective. This egoistic behavior makes it very difficult to see the overall picture. But buddhas and ancestors recommend that we first stand up in the appropriate place. Just stand up, be present in the Universe itself.

  Dainin Katagiri

  Real, Mean, Knowing

  10 Copy quote

• As commonly understood, creationism involves belief in an earth formed only about ten thousand years ago, an interpretation of the Bible that is still very popular. For the record, I have no reason to doubt that the universe is the billions of years old that physicists say it is. Further, I find the idea of common descent (that all organisms share a common ancestor) fairly convincing, and have no particular reason to doubt it.

  Michael Behe

  Years, Ideas, Doubt

  15 Copy quote