Genes Quotes - Page 3

• We were his disposable things. Brought to him like cattle. Stripped of what made us sisters or daughters or children. There was nothing that he could take from us—our genes, our bones, our wombs—that would ever satisfy him. There was no other way that we would be free.

  Lauren DeStefano

  Daughter, Children, Would Be

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• Freedom is a state of mind, I said wondering where I'd heard it before, not a state of being. We are all slaves to gravity and morality and the vicissitudes of nature. Our genes govern us much more than we'd like to think. Our bodies can not know absolute freedom but our minds can, can at least try.

  Walter Mosley

  Thinking, Mind, Trying

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• Isn't it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another without trying to own each other? Or is that buried so deep in our genes that we can never get it out? Territoriality.

  Orson Scott Card

  Trying, Buried, Persons

  Orson Scott Card (2011). “Xenocide: Book 3 of the Ender Saga”, p.228, Hachette UK

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• We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library

  Carl Sagan

  Memories, Brain, Library

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Cosmos”, p.305, Ballantine Books

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• If you think about a child that is born and how it's born, if it has racism in his genes, every child that is raised up to hit or beat someone up with anger and resentments.

  John Assaraf

  Children, Thinking, Racism

  Source: insearchofheroes.com

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• In all probability the Human Genome Project will, someday, find that I carry some recessive gene for optimism, because despite all my best efforts I still can't scrape together even a couple days of hopelessness. Future scientists will call it the Pollyanna Syndrome, and if forced to guess, I'd say that mine has been a way-long case history of chasing rainbows.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Couple, Best Effort, Chasing Rainbows

  "Damned". Book by Chuck Palahniuk, 2011.

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• There is a balance, a kind of standoff between the time continuum and the human entity, our frail bundle of soma and psyche. We eventually succumb to time, it's true, but time depends on us. We carry it in our muscles and genes, pass it on to the next set of time-factoring creatures, our brown-eyed daughters and jug-eared sons, or how would the world keep going. Never mind the time theorists, the cesium devices that measure the life and death of the smallest silvery trillionth of a second.... We were the only crucial clocks, our minds and bodies, way stations for the distribution of time.

  Don DeLillo

  Daughter, Time, Son

  Don DeLillo (2015). “Underworld: Picador Classic”, p.232, Pan Macmillan

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• Borna virus is not a retrovirus. It doesn't actually insert its own genes into our cells. What it does is just hangs out near our DNA and uses some of the molecular machinery to copy itself.

  Carl Zimmer

  Dna, Cells, Viruses

  Source: bigthink.com

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• About 1.2% of the human genome is made up of genes, things that encode for proteins, the stuff that we consider us. There is about 8.3% that's a virus. In other words we're probably about seven times more virus than we are human genes, which is kind of a weird way to thinking about yourself.

  Carl Zimmer

  Thinking About You, Stuff, Way

  Source: bigthink.com

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• I wanted to be a vet, a nurse, a chef - I mean, anything but the music industry. But once I hit high school, the bug really bit me. You can't deny where you come from and what's in your genes, and music definitely was. I haven't looked back since.

  Hillary Scott

  School, Mean, Nurse

  "Lady Antebellum Talk Crushes, Clashes and Chemistry". Interview with Beville Darden, theboot.com. May 23, 2008.

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• So you're her brother? Says Linn. I guess we know who got the good genes.

  Veronica Roth

  Brother, Good Genes, Knows

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• Please don't wear skinny jeans if you don't have skinny genes.

  Seth Rogen

  Jeans, Skinny, Please

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• If we studied human beings which can include human genes, human blood samples, and human behavior, then you can leave the animals out of the labs and you can leave them off your plate.

  Neal Barnard

  Animal, Blood, Labs

  Source: therumpus.net

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• In fact, there are autism clusters, you know, around some of the big tech centers. You take two socially awkward computer programmers and put them together, that can kind of concentrate the autistic genes.

  Temple Grandin

  Two, Autism, Awkward

  "Autism & animal welfare activist Temple Grandin". The Tavis Smiley Show, www.pbs.org. July 5, 2013.

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• Of course our genes will make some capacities very much easier to learn than others, and of course our genes themselves are not learned. But the point remains that genes themselves are not cognitive capacities, and that anything worth calling a cognitive capacity will depend to some degree on learning and so not be innate.

  David Papineau

  Degrees, Calling, Easier

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• What I imagined doesn't require anti-gravity beams or anything too spectacular, just advances in analysing different genes, finding out what they can do and recombining them.

  Jonathan Trigell

  Different, Beam, Gravity

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• There's very little that shocks me because I consider life a miracle so I guess what shocks me is that life exists. How the hell did we get here? What shocks me is that bacteria alter their genes and resist antibiotics and viruses resist vaccines.

  Bernie Siegel

  Vaccines, Miracle, Viruses

  Source: theindiespiritualist.com

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• Two brains are better than one. You've twice the brain capacity and you have two sets of experiences and genes to bring to any challenge.

  Philippa Perry

  Two, Challenges, Brain

  Source: bigthink.com

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• I’m too young, too smart, and too good-looking to die. Yeah, and then some. The world needed him to improve the gene pool. Not to mention, at fourteen he hadn’t even had his first date yet. He’d only just, this night, had his first kiss. He should have recognized that alone as a sign that the apocalypse was coming and that his death was imminent.’ – Nick

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Smart, Kissing, Night

  Sherrilyn Kenyon (2011). “Invincible: The Chronicles of Nick”, p.8, St. Martin's Griffin

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• I've been a skinny girl my whole life. I just don't sit down - I'm always on the go. It must be down to the genes. We have a healthy body image in my house and great appetites. It'd be hard for you to find a food I don't love.

  Donna Air

  Girl, House, Healthy

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• We know specific genes are turned on in specific cells, but we don't know to what extent this happens.

  Walter Gilbert

  Cells, Happens, Knows

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• As has repeatedly been stated, the underlying hypothesis, which in a number of cases has been supported by direct experimental evidence, is that each gene controls the production, function, and specificity of a particular enzyme.

  Edward Lawrie Tatum

  Numbers, Enzymes, Function

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• The body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene

  Matt Ridley

  Body, Vehicle

  Matt Ridley (2012). “The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature”, p.9, Harper Collins

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• Sexual reproduction exists solely as a means to defeat parasites. By mixing male and female genes, sex produces offspring not exactly like either the male or female - making each generation different from the last, and presenting a moving target to intruders intent on compromising this system. ... Even with this variation, parasites continue to pose a threat... and parasitism evolves and moves through any system - not just living things. The less variation there is in a system, the more readily parasites will evolve to infest it.

  Daniel Suarez

  Sex, Moving, Mean

  Daniel Suarez (2009). “Daemon”, p.425, Penguin

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• I thought I'd gone to heaven, because I grew up watching Roy and Gene Autry

  Lee Majors

  Heaven, Gone, Grew Up

  "Man in a 'Million'". Interview with Terry Pace, www.timesdaily.com. July 21, 2005.

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