Ancestors Quotes

1. "The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be."
Author: Alain De Botton

2. "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"
Author: Alan Gratz

3. "The longer I am a writer--so long now that my writing finger is periodically numb--the better I understand what writing is; what its function is; what it is supposed to do. I learn that the writer's pen is a microphone held up to the mouths of ancestors and even stones of long ago. That once given permission by the writer--a fool, and so why should one fear?--horses, dogs, rivers, and, yes, chickens can step forward and expound on their lives. The magic of this is not so much in the power of the microphone as in the ability of the nonhuman object or animal to BE and the human animal to PERCEIVE ITS BEING."
Author: Alice Walker

4. "The book begins and ends with the visits to give the impression of a tunnel into their ancestors and family history. I believe in going backwards into the past - I felt I was digging a tunnel back to the past."
Author: Anita Desai

5. "It was a true conversation. About whether our ancestors had more important lives than we do. And how they've managed to trick us, if they did not."
Author: Barbara Kingsolver

6. "Coal, oil and gas are called fossil fuels, because they are mostly made of the fossil remains of beings from long ago. The chemical energy within them is a kind of stored sunlight originally accumulated by ancient plants. Our civilization runs by burning the remains of humble creatures who inhabited the Earth hundreds of millions of years before the first humans came on the scene. Like some ghastly cannibal cult, we subsist on the dead bodies of our ancestors and distant relatives. - Dr. Carl Sagan"
Author: Carl Sagan

7. "Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries."
Author: Carl Sagan

8. "The Old Cornwall Society decided during the 1920s to revive the custom of lighting fires along the Cornish peninsula, beginning in the east and moving westward as dusk approached. It is a custom which continues today and, when watched from a distance, still has the power to evoke in anyone who observes this ritual a deep connection with the earth and the ancestors."
Author: Carole Carlton

9. "Eugene has to stop doing God's job. God is big enough to do his own job. If God will judge our father for choosing to follow the way of our ancestors, then let God do the judging, not Eugene."
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

10. "When we gather together in the moonlit village ground it is not because of the moon. Every man can see it in his own compound. We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so. [...] But I fear for you young people because you do not understand how strong is the bond of kinship. You do not know what it is to speak with one voice. And what is the result? An abominable religion has settled among you. A man can now leave his father and his brothers. He can curse the gods of his fathers and his ancestors, like a hunter's dog that suddenly goes mad and turns on his master. I fear for you; I fear for the clan."
Author: Chinua Achebe

11. "While all societies make their own imaginaries (institutions, laws, traditions, beliefs and behaviors), autonomous societies are those that their members are aware of this fact, and explicitly self-institute (a?t?-??µ???ta?). In contrast, the members of heteronomous societies attribute their imaginaries to some extra-social authority (i.e. God, ancestors, historical necessity)"
Author: Cornelius Castoriadis

12. "When our ancestors were attacked at Pearl Harbor, they called it a day that would live in infamy. The day the Partials attacked us with the RM Virus will not live in anything, because there will be none of us left to remember it."-President David R. Cregan, March 21, 2065, in a press conference at the White House. Three hours later he hanged himself."
Author: Dan Wells

13. "Miracles are commonplace in religious scripture. Our ancient ancestors are said to have felt Jesus' wounds, verified Muhammad's ascent to heaven, and even interacted with their respective deities directly. Today, believers have no such luxury. They are forced to rely on blind faith that these things occurred, that people were at one time able to overcome or render inert natural laws."
Author: David G. McAfee

14. "Memories are their own descendents masquerading as the ancestors of the present."
Author: David Mitchell

15. "In this shifting landscape, we may tend to forget "what the old folks say." Most of us probably now realize that our ancestors did indeed have it right! Their common-sense ways allowed them to get through the worst of conditions throughout history and still we thrive from their bold undertakings."
Author: Deborah L. Parker

16. "Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors."
Author: Edward Dahlberg

17. "All this very plausible reasoning does not convince me, as it has not convinced the wisest of our Statesmen, that our ancestors erred in laying it down as an axiom of policy that the toleration of Irregularity is incompatible with the safety of the State."
Author: Edwin A. Abbott

18. "...we should be grateful for them because without our family—the ancestors we descend from, the cousins we see once a year, the loves our lives we see every day—life is pretty boring."
Author: Ellen DeGeneres

19. "StarClan may go where they please, they have betrayed SkyClan. From this day on, I will have nothing more to do with our warrior ancestors. StarClan allowed the Twolegs to destroy our home. They look down on us now, and let the moon go on shining while you drive us out. They said there would always be five Clans in the forest, but they lied. SkyClan will never look to the stars again."
Author: Erin Hunter

20. "There is no escape - we pay for the violence of our ancestors."
Author: Frank Herbert

21. "Do not throw away your heart. Keep your heart. Your heart is all that matters ... Throw away your ancestors! ... Throw away your shyness and the anger that lies just a few inches beneath ... Accept the truth! And if there is more than one truth, then learn to do the difficult work -- learn to choose. You are good enough, you are HUMAN ENOUGH, to choose!"
Author: Gary Shteyngart

22. "Quite recently the human descent theory has been stigmatized as the 'gorilla theory of human ancestry.' All this despite the fact that Darwin himself, in the days when not a single bit of evidence regarding the fossil ancestors of man was recognized, distinctly stated that none of the known anthropoid apes, much less any of the known monkeys, should be considered in any way as ancestral to the human stock."
Author: Henry Fairfield Osborn

23. "Elizabeth [Alexander] is right, of course. It's a stirring fact that our slave ancestors left behind not documents of property but an incredible amount of cultural wealth. It is a tragedy that we are only able to imagine their individual contributions to that collective wealth- and the worlds they might have made had they been free."
Author: Henry Louis Gates Jr.

24. "My first name - I have no middle name - was chosen by my father, as he told me, on that solitary walk in the forested hills. He selected it from a verse of the seventh chapter of Isaiah; there was no Immanuel among our ancestors known to him."
Author: Immanuel Velikovsky

25. "The Prime of LifeIt was, in truth, an eager youthWho halted me one day.He gazed in bliss at me, and thisIs what he had to say;"Why, mazel tov, it's Asimov,A blessing on your head!For many a year, I've lived in fearThat you were long since dead.Or if alive, one fifty-fiveCold years had passed you by,And left you weak, with poor physique,Thin hair and rheumy eye.For sure enough, I've read your stuffSince I was but a ladAnd couldn't spell or hardly tellThe good yarns from the bad.My father, too, was reading youBefore he met my Ma.For you he yearned, once he had learnedAbout you from his Pa.Since time began, you wondrous man,My ancestors did loveThat s.f. dean and writing machineThe aged Asimov."I'd had my fill. I said, "Be still!I've kept my old-time spark.My step is light, my eye is bright,My hair is thick and dark."His smile, in brief, spelled disbelief,So this is what I did;I scowled, you know, and with one blow,I killed that rotten kid."
Author: Isaac Asimov

26. "...we are the product of this universe and I think it can be argued that the entire cosmic code is imprinted in us. Just as our genes carry the memory of our biological ancestors, our logic carries the memory of our cosmological ancestry. We are not just imposing human-centric notions on a cosmos independent of us. We are progeny of this cosmos and our ability to understand it is an inheritance."
Author: Janna Levin

27. "In many traditions, the world was sung into being: Aboriginal Australians believe their ancestors did so. In Hindu and Buddhist thought, Om was the seed syllable that created the world."
Author: Jay Griffiths

28. "Humans are upsetting a fragile balance that their own human ancestors established."
Author: Joan D. Vinge

29. "In a society so estranged from animals as ours, we often fail to credit them with any form of language. If we do, it comes under the heading of communication rather than speech. And yet, the great silence we have imposed on the rest of life contains innumerable forms of expression. Where does our own language come from but this unfathomed store that characterizes innumerable species? We are now more than halfway removed from what the unwritten word meant to our ancestors, who believed in the original, primal word behind all manifestations of the spirit. You sang because you were answered. The answers come from life around you. Prayers, chants, and songs were also responses to the elements, to the wind, the sun and stars, the Great Mystery behind them. Life on earth springs from a collateral magic that we rarely consult. We avoid the unknown as if we were afraid that contact would lower our sense of self-esteem."
Author: John Hay

30. "You are the posterity of your family. You are either continuing the progression or regression of your ancestors."
Author: Johnnie Dent Jr.

31. "No one can be free who has a thousand ancestors."
Author: L.M. Montgomery

32. "By creating a society in which all people, of all colors, were granted freedom and citizenship, the Haitian Revolution forever transformed the world. It was a central part of the destruction of slavery in the Americas, and therefore a crucial moment in the history of democracy, one that laid the foundation for the continuing struggles for human rights everywhere. In this sense we are all descendents of the Haitain Revolution, and responsible to these ancestors."
Author: Laurent Dubois

33. "She didn't know what a goji berry was, but it sounded like something Amazonian tribesmen might eat when they wanted to talk to their ancestors and embark on an inner voyage into some sort of unicorn-infested netherworld. Whatever worked."
Author: Lola Salt

34. "Nector [speaking to Bernadette] could have told her, having drunk down the words of Nanapush, that comfort is not security and money in the hand disappears. He could have told her that only the land matters and never to let go of the papers, the titles, the tracks of the words, all those things that his ancestors never understood how the vital relationship to the dirt and grass under their feet."
Author: Louise Erdrich

35. "It is so awkward that how our ancestors wasted their whole life and never thought about education or making difference for the future generations. My Grandfather lived more than a 100+ years, married 3 women and as he was illiterate he just wasted 115 fucking years. I wish I could live a hundred years like him to make difference, so the next generation does not use the same insulting words I am using today."
Author: M.F. Moonzajer

36. "Jesus is an example. We have other examples, including many of our ancestors as role models who understood the inner meaning of our orientation."
Author: Malcolm Boyd

37. "Don't drive a car in the dream, else you won't drive it on earth. Don't wish to become, else you won't become. Don't associate with fools, else your ancestors will be insulted. Don't be addicted to wine, else your pocket will be empty. Don't be drunk, else you'll be attacked."
Author: Michael Bassey Johnson

38. "My guess is that the Jonathan would be as out of place in England or Kazakhstan, the native ground of its ancestors, as I would be in Russia, the native ground of my own. The arrow of natural history won't be reversed: by now the Jonathan's as much an American as I am."
Author: Michael Pollan

39. "I say, then, that hereditary States, accustomed to the family of their Prince, are maintained with far less difficulty than new States, since all that is required is that the Prince shall not depart from the usages of his ancestors, trusting for the rest to deal with events as they arise."
Author: Niccolò Machiavelli

40. "There iz no alternativ. Every possible reezon that could ever be offered for altering the spelling of wurds, stil exists in full force; and if a gradual reform should not be made in our language, it wil proov that we are less under the influence of reezon than our ancestors.[This quote illustrates the reformed spelling advocated by Webster.]"
Author: Noah Webster

41. "And when, at last, .... I stood in London with ten pounds in my hand - five of which I promptly lost - the ancestors dwelling in my blood who, all my life, had summoned me with insistent eldritch voices, murmured together, like contented cats."
Author: P.L. Travers

42. "We are a continuum. Just as we reach back to our ancestors for our fundamental values, so we, as guardians of that legacy, must reach ahead to our children and their children. And we do so with a sense of sacredness in that reaching."
Author: Paul Tsongas

43. "I am not a churchgoing man. Strangled in the vines of form and choked with ritual Christians, Sunday service held no appeal for me as a child. When my parents released me from compulsory attendance, I would never return. In my view, religion is best practiced out of doors, in nature's cathedral of miracles where spirits and the arts of heaven mingle unencumbered. The spirits were present on the tiny unmarked parcel at Mount Vernon that early autumn afternoon.Hazel and I stood for a long while in complete silence. Words would have marred, much as they misserve this inadequate telling of what we felt. We had been touched by wearied souls calling, in a language ethereal as morning mist, from the near realm that awaits us all.These were 'our' ancestors and, alone behind an old wooden outbuilding, my wife and I had wordlessly worshiped with them on that clear crisp afternoon."
Author: Randall Robinson

44. "The flower inside the fruit that is both its parent and its child. Decadent as ancestors. The portal and that which passes. Nuclear devices activated, and the machine keeps pushing time through the cogs, like paste into strings into paste again, and only the machine keeps using time to make time to make time. And when the machine stops, time was an illusion that we created free will."
Author: Ronald D. Moore

45. "It's just old black-and-whites,' she had said, flicking her wrist in the way one might dismiss a pile of junk mail. 'Relatives nobody remembers.' 'No,' I said, running to the box. 'Don't throw them out. I'll keep them.' I may not have known the names of the majority of the ancestors pictured inside, but it felt like a betrayal to send their memories to the landfill. I couldn't bear the thought."
Author: Sarah Jio

46. "You think that the world we live in is ordinary. We make noise and static to fill the empty spaces where ghosts live. We let other people grow our food, bleach our clothes. We seal ourselves in, clean the dirt from our skins, eat of animals whose blood does not stain our hands. We long ago left the ways of our ancestors, oracles and blood sacrifice, traffic with the spirit world, listening for the voices out of stones and trees. But maybe sometimes you have felt the uncanny, alone at night in a dark wood, or waiting by the edge of the ocean for the tide to come in. We have paved over the ancient world, but that does not mean we have erased it."
Author: Sarah McCarry

47. "When it's all over and the dust from our Ancestors bodies and our own settle from the four winds only then will we see that we were here!"
Author: Stanley Victor Paskavich

48. "We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity."
Author: T.S. Eliot

49. "Everyone knew there were wolves in the mountains, but they seldom came near the village - the modern wolves were the offspring of ancestors that had survived because they had learned that human meat had sharp edges."
Author: Terry Pratchett

50. "Decades ago, our ancestors realized that it is not just political ideology, religious belief, race, or nationalism that is to blame for a warring world. Rather, they determined that it was the fault of human personality - of humankind's inclination towards evil, in whatever form that is. They divided into factions that sought to eradicate those qualities they believed responsible for the world's disarray."
Author: Veronica Roth

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