Hereditary Quotes

1. "Optimism, n. The doctrine, or belief, that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly, everything good, especially the bad, and everything right that is wrong. It is held with greatest tenacity by those most accustomed to the mischance of falling into adversity, and is most acceptably expounded with disproof - an intellectual disorder, yielding to no treatment but death. It is hereditary, but fortunately not contagious."
Author: Ambrose Bierce

2. "What did I fear, and why? — I, to whom the night had beena more familiar facethan that of man —I, in whom that element of hereditary superstition from which none of us is altogether free had given to solitude and darkness and silence only a more alluring interest and charm!"
Author: Ambrose Bierce

3. "Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely- make that miraculously- fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, everyone of your forbears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from it's life quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - evetually, astoundingly, and all to briefly- in you."
Author: Bill Bryson

4. "Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you."
Author: Bill Bryson

5. "A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism."
Author: Carl Sagan

6. "...it obeys none of the natural laws of hereditary and environmental change, pays no attention to the survival of the fittest, positively sneers at any attempt on the part of man to work out a rational life cycle, is possibly immortal, unquestionably immoral, evidences anabolism but not katabolism, ruts, spawns, and breeds but does not reproduce, lays no eggs, builds no nests, seeks but does not find, wanders but does not rest."
Author: Charles Grandison Finney

7. "I finally demonstrated that typhus infection is not hereditary in the louse."
Author: Charles Jules Henry Nicole

8. "The prince's official job description as king will be 'defender of the faith,' which currently means the state-financed absurdity of the Anglican Church, but he has more than once said publicly that he wants to be anointed as defender of all faiths—another indication of the amazing conceit he has developed in six decades of performing the only job allowed him by the hereditary principle: that of waiting for his mother to expire."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

9. "Wrinkles are hereditary. Parents get them from their children."
Author: Doris Day

10. "If the wedding was wanted at Melrose—and Buccleuch, as Hereditary Bailie of the Abbey lands, had fewer objections than usual to any idea not his own—then the congregation had to come armed, that was all. The Scotts and their allies, the twenty polite Frenchmen from Edinburgh, the Italian commander with the lame leg, had left their men at arms outside with their horses, the plumed helmets lashed to the saddlebows; and if there were a few vacant seats where a man from Hawick or Bedrule had ducked too late ten days before, no one mentioned it."
Author: Dorothy Dunnett

11. "There was a uniqueness to the American case of slavery. 10 million people, a conservative estimate, were brought to America... hundreds of people were set up in work camps, and hereditary-forced labor was put in place. That's a very different thing than the personal slavery that existed elsewhere."
Author: Edward Ball

12. "Of the various forms of government which have prevailed in the world, an hereditary monarchy seems to present the fairest scope for ridicule."
Author: Edward Gibbon

13. "But I was right. I think that must be an hereditary quality, for my father says he is scarcely ever wrong."
Author: Elizabeth Gaskell

14. "Money and titles may be hereditary," she would say, "but brains are not,"..."
Author: Emmuska Orczy

15. "The greater part of the governments on earth may be termed monarchical aristocracies, or hereditary dominions independent of the people."
Author: Ezra Stiles

16. "We stand a better chance with aristocracy, whether hereditary or elective, than with monarchy."
Author: Ezra Stiles

17. "Unceasing warfare gives rise to its own social conditions which have been similar in all epochs. People enter a permanent state of alertness to ward off attacks. You see the absolute rule of the autocrat. All new things become dangerous frontier districts—new planets, new economic areas to exploit, new ideas or new devices, visitors—everything suspect. Feudalism takes firm hold, sometimes disguised as a politbureau or similar structure, but always present. Hereditary succession follows the lines of power. The blood of the powerful dominates."
Author: Frank Herbert

18. "Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class -- whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy."
Author: Frank Herbert

19. "Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgements; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud ofwhich he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, andalready weary of hearing what he has never heard."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

20. "In his Preface to the 1892 edition of Tess of the d'Urbervilles Hardy warns the reader that ‘a novel is an impression, not an argument'. However, the text offers several explanations of Tess's tragedy; social, psychological, hereditary, and fatalistic, all of which proceed from the assumption that Hardy's text is in some sense determined, and that the character of Tess is somehow knowable. Indeed, the tragedy of Tess is in this sense overdetermined. But it should be remembered that the character of Tess is constructed in the text from many points of observation, including that of the ambivalent narrator; constructed that is from impressions."
Author: Geoffrey Harvey

21. "That's because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear - the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness."
Author: H.P. Lovecraft

22. "In one word, Queequeg, said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans."
Author: Herman Melville

23. "Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from that same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary."
Author: Herman Melville

24. "In Pakistan politics is hereditary."
Author: Imran Khan

25. "OUR history begins before we are born. We represent the hereditary influences of our race, and our ancestors virtually live in us."
Author: James Nasmyth

26. "I can't tell you if genius is hereditary, because heaven has granted me no offspring."
Author: James Whistler

27. "It was such a heavenly dream: dreamed between the reality of war and the reality of hereditary madness."
Author: Jessie Douglas Kerruish

28. "History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what do do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from."
Author: Jill Lepore

29. "Death is hereditary. Make sure you enjoy each day before it catches you."
Author: Jill Shalvis

30. "I think the whole under-eye-bag thing is hereditary, and I just got lucky."
Author: Julianna Margulies

31. "DNA was the chemical material on which hereditary information was recorded, while a gene was one unit of that nearly infinite amount of hereditary information."
Author: Koji Suzuki

32. "The steward, according to custom, had stopped all the clocks. This, in the language of Narouz, said, "Your stay with us is so brief, let us not be reminded of the flight of the hours. God made eternity. Let us escape from the despotism of time altogether." These ancient and hereditary politenesses filled Nessim with emotion."
Author: Lawrence Durrell

33. "Universal peace-time conscription was adopted by almost all countries as the basis of their military system. This ensured that wars would grow bigger in scale, longer in duration, and worse in effects. While conscription appeared democratic, it provided autocrats, hereditary or revolutionary, with more effective and comprehensive means of imposing their will, both in peace and war. Once the rule of compulsory service in arms was established for the young men of a nation, it was an obvious and easy transition to the servitude of the whole population. Totalitarian tyranny is the twin of total warfare —which might aptly be termed a reversion to tribal warfare on a larger scale."
Author: Liddell Hart

34. "Alderic, Knight of the Order of the City and the Assault, hereditary Guardian of the King's Peace of Mind, a man not unremembered among the makers of myth, pondered so long upon the Gibbelins' hoard that by now he deemed it his. Alas that I should say of so perilous a venture, undertaken at dead of night by a valorous man, that its motive was sheer avarice! Yet upon avarice only the Gibbelins relied to keep their larders full, and once in every hundred years sent spies into the cities of men to see how avarice did, and always the spies returned again to the tower saying that all was well.It may be thought that, as the years went on and men came by fearful ends on that tower's wall, fewer and fewer would come to the Gibbelins' table: but the Gibbelins found otherwise.("The Hoard Of The Gibbelins")"
Author: Lord Dunsany

35. "There are intellectual vagabonds, to whom the hereditary dwelling-place of their fathers seems too cramped and oppressive for them to be willing to satisfy themselves with the limited space any more: instead of keeping within the limits of a temperate style of thinking, and taking as inviolable truth what furnishes comfort and tranquility to thousands, they overlap all bounds of the traditional and run wild with their imprudent criticism and untamed mania for doubt, these extravagating vagabonds."
Author: Max Stirner

36. "When most people said "I'm psychic, you see," they meant "I have an overactive but unoriginal imagination/wear black nail varnish/talk to my budgie;" when Anathema said it, it sounded as though she was admitting to a hereditary disease which she'd much prefer not to have."
Author: Neil Gaiman

37. "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

38. "He, therefore, who acquires such a State, if he mean to keep it, must see to two things; first, that the blood of the ancient line of Princes be destroyed; second, that no change be made in respect of laws or taxes; for in this way the newly acquired State speedily becomes incorporated with the hereditary."
Author: Niccolò Machiavelli

39. "I'm dyslexic, I have attention-deficit disorder, and I've got something like a hereditary tremor."
Author: Ozzy Osbourne

40. "Gussie is an orange-juice addict. He drinks nothing else.' 'I was not aware of that, sir.' 'I have it from his own lips. Whether from some hereditary taint, or because he promised his mother he wouldn't, or simply because he doesn't like the taste of the stuff, Gussie Fink-Nottle has never in the whole course of his career pushed so much as the simplest gin and tonic over the larynx"
Author: P.G. Wodehouse

41. "Oh my god, you really are insane." "Probably," he said with a shrug, "but don't worry I doubt it's hereditary so the baby should be fine."
Author: R.L. Mathewson

42. "If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them, without having himself tortured and executed in payment—thereby, incidentally, condemning remote future generations of Jews to pogroms and persecution as 'Christ-killers': did that hereditary sin pass down in the semen too?"
Author: Richard Dawkins

43. "Thatcher once said that if she were a visitor from Mars required to create a constitutional system, "I would set up ... a hereditary monarchy, wonderfully trained, in duty and in leadership which understands example, which is always there, which is above politics, for which the whole nation has an affection and which is a symbol of patriotism."
Author: Sally Bedell Smith

44. "Insanity is hereditary; you get it from your children."
Author: Sam Levenson

45. "For it is not cell nuclei, not even individual chromosomes, but certain parts of certain chromosomes from certain cells that must be isolated and collected in enormous quantities for analysis; that would be the precondition for placing the chemist in such a position as would allow him to analyse [the hereditary material] more minutely than [can] the morphologists ... For the morphology of the nucleus has reference at the very least to the gearing of the clock, but at best the chemistry of the nucleus refers only to the metal from which the gears are formed."
Author: Theodor Boveri

46. "Virtue is not hereditary."
Author: Thomas Paine

47. "The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe that this almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty is a hereditary trait."
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

48. "Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary."
Author: Walter Scott

49. "I call that mind free, which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come."
Author: William Ellery Channing

50. "I am not a hereditary politician and do not have any substantial asset."
Author: Yoshihiko Noda

Hereditary Quotes Pictures