Descendant Quotes

1. "We have inherited a fear of memories of slavery. It is as if to remember and acknowledge slavery would amount to our being consumed by it. As a matter of fact, in the popular black imagination, it is easier for us to construct ourselves as children of Africa, as the sons and daughters of kings and queens, and thereby ignore the Middle Passage and centuries of enforced servitude in the Americas. Although some of us might indeed be the descendants of African royalty, most of us are probably descendants of their subjects, the daughters and sons of African peasants or workers."
Author: Angela Y. Davis

2. "You killed them, Reuben. You killed them in their sins! You terminated their destiny on this earth. You snatched from them any chance for repentance, for redemption. You took that from them. You took it all, Reuben. You snuffed out forever the years of reparation they might have lived! You took life itself from them and you took it from their descendants, and yes, even from their victims, you took what their amends might have been."
Author: Anne Rice

3. "I felt every part of that animal music, felt it eat me up and spit me out, and what emerged was a me a thousand times more powerful than Piper Vaughan. I was Piper Vaughan, guitar hero - spiritual descendant of Jimi Hendrix and proponent of pure anarchy. And I ROCKED."
Author: Antony John

4. "Were God to show grace to all of Adam's descendants, men would at once conclude that He was righteously compelled to take them to heaven as meet compensation for allowing the human race to fall into sin. But the great God in under no obligation to any of his creatures, least of all to those who are rebels against him."
Author: Arthur W. Pink

5. "To Adam Paradise was home. To the good among his descendants home is paradise."
Author: Augustus Hare

6. "Bachelorhood: all the fun of married life and more prosperity, leaving lots of descendants to boast of their father's memory to their fellow inmates."
Author: Bauvard

7. "Our instinctive apparatus consists of two parts- the one tending to further our own life and that of our descendants, the other tending to thwart the lives of supposed rivals."
Author: Bertrand Russell

8. "I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman, weeping for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her husband, their course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know that each was not more honoured and held sacred in the other's soul, than I was in the souls of both."
Author: Charles Dickens

9. "We inherited these principles and these freedoms and we here highly resolve that we shall pass them on, as we will pass on an undivided Republic purged of racism and slavery, to our descendants. The popgun discharges of a few pathetic sectarians and crackpot revisionists are negligible, and will be drowned by the mounting chorus that demands: 'Mr Jefferson! BUILD UP THAT WALL'."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

10. "I would rather my descendants have greater abilities and a greater knowledge of the love of Christ than I do, much like standing on one's shoulders in order to get a clearer view of the valley."
Author: Criss Jami

11. "This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants."
Author: David Foster Wallace

12. "The truth is "#9dream" is a descendant of "Norwegian Wood". Both are ghost stories. "She" in "Norwegian Wood" curses you with loneliness. The "Two spirits dancing so strange" in "#9dream" bless you with harmony. But people prefer loneliness to harmony."
Author: David Mitchell

13. "Slavery has been outlawed in most arab countries for years now but there are villages in jordan made up entirely of descendants of runaway Saudi slaves. Abdulrahman knows he might be free, but hes still an arab. No one ever wants to be the arab - its too old and too tragic, too mysterious and too exasperating, and too lonely for anyone but an actual arab to put up with for very long. Essentially, its an image problem. Ask anyone, Persian, Turks, even Lebanese and Egyptians - none of them want to be the arab. They say things like, well, really we're indo-russian-asian european- chaldeans, so in the end the only one who gets to be the arab is the same little old bedouin with his goats and his sheep and his poetry about his goats and his sheep, because he doesnt know that he's the arab, and what he doesnt know wont hurt him."
Author: Diana Abu Jaber

14. "Mr L Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he was a carbon-based life form descended from an ape. More specifically he was forty, fat and shabby and worked for the local council. Curiously enough, though he didn't know it, he was also a direct male-line descendant of Genghis Khan, though intervening generations and racial mixing had so juggled his genes that he had no discernible Mongoloid characteristics, and the only vestiges left in Mr L Prosser of his mighty ancestry were a pronounced stoutness about the tum and a predilection for little fur hats."
Author: Douglas Adams

15. "Every scientist is a descendant of [Alexander von] Humboldt. We are all his family."
Author: Emil Heinrich Du Bois Reymond

16. "Ever since then, all descendant vertebrates have had the forward end of the digestive system and the forward end of the respiratory system very much involved with each other. This manifests itself in the human body with a crossing of the two systems in the throat."
Author: George C. Williams

17. "Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers; essentially, a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software."
Author: Greg Egan

18. "Un rideau de flocons blancs ininterrompu miroitait sans cesse en descendant vers la terre; il effaçait les formes, poudrait les choses d'une mousse de glace; et l'on n'entendait plus, dans le grand silence de la ville calme et ensevelie sous l'hiver, que ce froissement vague, innommable et flottant de la neige qui tombe, plutôt sensation que bruit , entremêlement d'atomes légers qui semblaient emplir l'espace, couvrir le monde."
Author: Guy De Maupassant

19. "Perhaps this was the first instance of that quiet way of "speaking for" a place not yet occupied, or at least not improved as much as it may be, which their descendants have practised, and are still practising so extensively. Not Any seems to have been the sole proprietor of all America before the Yankees [...] At any rate, I know that if you hold a thing unjustly, there will surely be the devil to pay at last."
Author: Henry David Thoreau

20. "The wise man must remember that while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future."
Author: Herbert Spencer

21. "John Ashcroft is not a patriot, John Ashcroft is a descendant of Joseph McCarthy."
Author: Howard Dean

22. "I feel more strongly with every recurring year that our country has no tradition which does it so much honour and which it should guard so jealously as that of its hospitality. It is a tradition that is unique as far as my experience goes (and I have visited not a few places abroad) among the modern nations. Some would say, perhaps, that with us it is rather a failing than anything to be boasted of. But granted even that, it is, to my mind, a princely failing, and one that I trust will long be cultivated among us. Of one thing, at least, I am sure. As long as this one roof shelters the good ladies aforesaid- and I wish from my heart it may do so for many and many a long year to come- the tradition of genuine warm-hearted courteous Irish hospitality, which our forefathers have handed down to us and which we must hand down to our descendants, is still alive among us."
Author: James Joyce

23. "Thus, immigrants from Korea really did make a big contribution to the modern Japanese, though we cannot yet say whether that was because of massive immigration or else modest immigration amplified by a high rate of population increase. The Ainu are more nearly the descendants of Japan's ancient Jomon inhabitants, mixed with Korean genes of Yayoi colonists and of the modern Japanese."
Author: Jared Diamond

24. "My maternal grandmother had what might be described in a school report as a 'lively imagination.' She told us that she was a direct descendant of Sir Christopher Wren."
Author: Jeremy Hardy

25. "I'm really convinced that our descendants a century or two from now will look back at us with the same pity that we have toward the people in the field of science two centuries ago."
Author: John Templeton

26. "But because their ancestors were men of righteousness, shall we consent to the abuses of their degenerate descendants? Because they did us a great good, would we be guilty if we prevented them from doing us evil?"
Author: José Rizal

27. "When man comes to the realization that he is not the "favorite" of God; that he was not specially created, that the universe was not made for his benefit, and that he is subject to the same laws of nature as all other forms of life, then, and not until then, will he understand that he must rely upon himself, and himself alone, for whatever benefits he is to enjoy; and devote his time and energies to helping himself and his fellow men to meet the exigencies of life and to set about to solve the difficult and intricate problems of living.The recognition of a problem is the first step to its solution— We are not "fallen" angels, nor were we "created" perfect.On the contrary, we are the product of millions of years of an unpurposed evolution. We are the descendants and inheritors of all the defects of our primitive ancestry—the evolution of the myriad forms of life from the infinitesimal to the mammoth—from the worm to the dinosaur."
Author: Joseph Lewis

28. "God is with the vanquished, not with the victors! At a time when His Holiness, the infallible Pope of Christendom, is concluding a peace agreement, a Concordat, with the enemies of Christ, when the Protestant's are establishing a "German church" and censoring the Bible, we descendants of the old Jews, the forefathers of European culture, are the only legitimate German representatives of that culture. Thanks to inscrutable divine wisdom, we are physically incapable of betraying it to the heathen civilization of poison gases, to the ammonia-breathing, Germanic war god."
Author: Joseph Roth

29. "Remember your ancestors, dream of your descendants and work hard while you're living."
Author: Karen Lord

30. "Mister MacKeltar," Drustan corrected for the umpteenth time, with a this-is-really-wearing-thin-but-I'm-determined-to-be-patient smile. No matter how many times he told Farley that he was not a laird, that he was simply Mr. MacKeltar, that it was Christopher (his modern-day descendant who lived up the road in the oldest castle on the land) who was actually laird, Farley refused to hear it. The eighty-something-year-old butler, who insisted he was sixty-two and who had obviously never before buttled in his life until the day he'd arrived on their doorstep, was determined to be a butler to a lord. Period. And he wasn't about to let Drustan interfere with that aspiration."
Author: Karen Marie Moning

31. "For our part, we shall continue to work for the new dawn when all the Children of Abraham and their descendants are living together in the birthplace of their three great monotheistic religions, a life free from fear, a life free from want - a life in peace."
Author: King Hussein I

32. "I had no choice but to accept these voices and images as my gift. My ability. Their energy engrossed my music. I played passionately for them. To set them free. They were part of my life now. I didn't chose them, they chose me."...Elizabeth (DESCENDANT– chapter 2)"
Author: L.J. Amodeo

33. "Don't settle for ordinary, go for the extraordinary ... Michael (Descendant)"
Author: L.J. Amodeo

34. "Each girl has to read her story out loud then we talk it over. We are going to keep them all sacredly and have them to read to our descendants. We each write under a nom do plume. Mine is Rosamond Montmorency. All the girls do pretty well. Ruby Gillis is rather sentimental. She puts too much lovemaking into her stories and you know too much is worse than too little. Jane never puts any because she says it makes her feel so silly when she has to read it out loud. Jane's stories are extremely sensible. Then Diana puts too many murders into hers. She says most of the time she doesn't know what to do with the people so she kills them off to get rid of them."
Author: L.M. Montgomery

35. "The land promised to Abraham and his descendants is once again theirs. God always keeps His promises. Even in times of cataclysmic upheaval and change, God's love and faithfulness are unchanging."
Author: Lynn Austin

36. "Pantera, as always, was awake. He sat near the window, fletching the last of his arrows by a thin, grey light that bled in past the shutters.Pantera the Leopard, trader and friend of traders; Pantera the Roman spy who claimed to have come from the emperor himself, and had letters enough to persuade a legionary commander in Oescusto give him two men; Pantera, who had picked me from four thousand others because, alone of my century, possibly of my cohort, perhaps of my legion, I could read and write Latin as well as Greek.Out of habit, I cursed my mother's father, who had paid for the tutor, believing that all his grandsons should be literate. For good measure, I cursed my father, and my father's father and all the way back up the line to the misbegotten son of a she-ass who had sold the great Bucephalos to Alexander and thus guaranteed that his descendants would be horse-traders for ever more."
Author: M.C. Scott

37. "Difficult as it was to hear, slavery has benefited descendants like me - I believe there is a superior athletic gene in us."
Author: Michael Johnson

38. "La terrasse bruisse d'un va-et-vient de tons montants, descendants, neutres qui font comme des exclamations et des glissades d'eau au milieu du chant des oiseaux."
Author: Nicole Brossard

39. "Senescence begins And middle-age ends The day your descendants Outnumber your friends"
Author: Ogden Nash

40. "The dodo itself stands as the best emblem of this general truth - that insular evolution often involves transforming an adventurous, high-flying ancestor species into a grounded descendant, no longer capable of going anywhere but extinct. It's our reminder that insular evolution, for all its wondrousness, tends to be a one-way tunnel toward doom."
Author: Quammen, David

41. "One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey."
Author: Raymond Queneau

42. "You know, I really hate Romans, but I have to say their descendants make one fine automobile. (Kyrian)"
Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon

43. "If a man made himself an expert in any particular branch of human activity, there would result the strong tendency that a peculiar aptitude towards the same branch would be found among some of his descendants."
Author: Sidney Lanier

44. "When the Byzantine emperor Isaac Angelus demanded it for the Orthodox, Saladin decided that they must share it under his supervision and appointed Sheikh Ghanim al-Khazraji as Custodian of the Church, a role still performed today by his descendants, the Nusseibeh family."
Author: Simon Sebag Montefiore

45. "Let other complain that the age is wicked; my complaint is that it is paltry; for it lacks passion. Men's thoughts are thin and flimsy like lace, they are themselves pitiable like the lacemakers. The thoughts of their hearts are too paltry to be sinful. For a worm it might be regarded as a sin to harbor such thoughts, but not for a being made in the image of God. Their lusts are dull and sluggish, their passions sleepy...This is the reason my soul always turns back to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. I feel that those who speak there are at least human beings: they hate, they love, they murder their enemies, and curse their descendants throughout all generations, they sin."
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

46. "Descendants. Eurystheus had been killed in Attica by the Heraclids. Atreus was his mother's brother; and to the hands of his relation,"
Author: Thucydides

47. "When we were on trees, others had lived in skies. When we reach skies, descendant of primitives will someday convey this message."
Author: Toba Beta

48. "Conceiv'd out of the fullest heat and pulse of European feudalism -personifying ill unparalleled ways the medieval aristocracy, its towering spirit of ruthless and gigantic caste, with its own peculiar air and arrogance (no mere imitation) -only one of the "wolfish earls" so plenteous in the plays themselves, or some born descendant and knower, might seem to be the true author of those amazing works -works in some respects greater than anything else ill recorded literature."
Author: Walt Whitman

49. "Projects undreamed of by past generations will absorb our immediate descendants, comforts, activities, amenities, pleasures will crowd upon them, but their hearts will ache and their lives will be barren, if they have not a vision above material things."
Author: Winston Churchill

50. "But first, I want the pleasure of telling you that you are fired. I fire you. I fire you and all your relatives. I fire your ancestors and your descendants. I fire the very air you breathe and the ground you walk upon."
Author: Z.A. Maxfield

Descendant Quotes Pictures