Top 100 Ancestor Quotes
#1. The common ancient ancestor of mulluses and chordates could not possibly have possessed a camera eye, so quite clearly they have evolved independently. The solution has been arrived at by completely different routes.
Simon Conway Morris
#2. Ain't you been listening? I'm YUSUKE URAMESHI... the same ornery dawg you've always known and loved. So I have a DEMON ANCESTOR! Big Deal! I'm still going To KICK Sensui's sorry butt! -Yusuke
Yoshihiro Togashi
#3. Ancestor worship, or filial piety so characteristic of Asian cultures, for example, does not really resonate with Americans who favor children, not grandparents.
Alan Dundes
#4. Differing from Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not think of time as absolute and uniform. He believed it an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times.
Jorge Luis Borges
#5. A friend of ours has a hobby doing genealogy, and we found out that we were cousins in the ninth degree, that we had a common ancestor on the Mayflower.
Marion Zimmer Bradley
#6. Maybe, it is easier to forget the past,
than to overcome the pain caused by it.
Maybe, it is one of some other reasons,
why men forget their prehuman ancestor.
Toba Beta
#7. When we look at things as simple as food, it's not about just nourishment and sustaining our life, it is really the seed of our ancestor.
Maya Tiwari
#8. A fossil is so powerful. It's moving. This is my ancestor. The naturalist is moved by the fossil ... not the cross.
Greg Graffin
#9. I live alone," Knud said, "and I work alone, but I am never truly alone. I do my ancestor's work. I live the entire history of my country and people.
Maureen Johnson
#10. We observe closely related species in sympatry and infer how they evolved from a common ancestor.
Peter R. Grant
#11. I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge.
William Gaddis
#13. Honor among thieves is the ancestor of all honor.
John McCarthy
#14. I'm a mixture of Anglo-Saxon, a bit of Spanish and one-eighth American. I've often wondered if I have an Asiatic ancestor from the East as well because I have deep-set eyes. Make-up artists are constantly trying to shade my eyelids, and I have to point out that I don't have any!
Olivia Williams
#15. An ancestor from the 1530s would find little different in the 1930s. [Basilicata, Italy]
Maria Martin
#16. a Philosopher could not grasp the modern idea of progress ... until he was willing to abandon ancestor worship, until he analyzed away his inferiority complex toward the past, and realized that his own generation was superior to any yet known
Carl Becker
#17. What kind of ethical philosophy is it that condemns every child, even before it is born, to inherit the sin of a remote ancestor? Augustine,
Richard Dawkins
#18. I love many places to which I have no connection, but identifying an ancestor, or someone I think is an ancestor, has taken me to places I'd never have gone to otherwise.
Jeremy Hardy
#19. Abraham is the shared ancestor of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He stands at the heart of these three faiths. And yet you know almost nothing about him.
Bruce Feiler
#20. If we go far enough back, any two people on Earth have a common ancestor.
Carl Sagan
#21. It is unclear how much longer people will write on dried and flattened wood. Trees do so much for humans and for our planet that it hardly seems fair to ask them to carry our thoughts as well. From Life from an RNA World: The Ancestor Within.
Michael Yarus
#22. And, you know, the fact is, if you believe in evolution, we all have a common ancestor, and we all have a common ancestry with the plant in the lobby. This is what evolution tells us. And, it's true. It's kind of unbelievable.
Jeff Hawkins
#23. Has a philosopher like you failed to discover that our country is more to be valued and higher and holier far than mother or father or any ancestor, and more to be regarded in the eyes of the gods and of men of understanding?
Socrates
#24. Ancestor worship must be an appealing idea to those who are about to become ancestors. - Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works
Daniel C. Dennett
#25. Our ancestor was an animal which breathed water, had a swim-bladder, a great swimming tail, an imperfect skull & undoubtedly was an hermaphrodite! Here is a pleasant genealogy for mankind.
Charles Darwin
#26. Molecular evidense suggests that our common ancestor with the chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between 5 and 7 million years ago, say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards.
Richard Dawkins
#27. But there stands the sword of my ancestor Sir Richard Vernon, slain at Shrewsbury, and sorely slandered by a sad fellow called Will Shakspeare, whose Lancastrian partialities, and a certain knack at embodying them, has turned history upside down, or rather inside out.
Walter Scott
#28. Oblonsy was fond of a pleasant joke, and sometimes liked to perplex a simple-minded man by observing that if you're going to be proud of your ancestry, why stop short at Prince Rurik and repudiate your oldest ancestor - the ape?
Leo Tolstoy
#29. When some remote ancestor of ours invented the shovel, he became a giver: He could plant a tree. And when the axe was invented, he became a taker: He could chop it down. Whoever owns land has thus assumed, whether he knows it or not, the divine functions of creating and destroying plants.
Aldo Leopold
#30. We talk different languages, eat different foods, but all humanity has one ancestor, which started from one person, which started from one god.
Ashraf Barhom
#31. People who can comfort the dead can also chase after them to hurt them further-a reverse ancestor worship.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#32. Moments go by in your life, becoming memories, and once the people who were apart of them are gone, so is the magic of the memory. A memory once told with laughter or detail, fades into a story long forgotten, like an ancestor remembered only by name.
Erin Waters
#33. If you have an ancestor who is a Benedictine monk, we would rather not know it.
Gregory Maguire
#34. I thought, If I'm an ancestor and grandmother when I'm twenty-five, I should go peacefully to the real time when I'm an ancestor and a grandmother.
Agnes Varda
#35. the first responsibility of a human
being is to be a better ancestor.
John Perry Barlow
#36. I haven't checked, but I highly suspect that chickens evolved from an egg-laying ancestor, which would mean that there were, in fact, eggs before there were chickens. Genius.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#37. Every man serves a useful purpose: a miser, for example, makes a wonderful ancestor.
Laurence J. Peter
#38. Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.
Yuval Noah Harari
#39. The ancestor of every destructive action, every destructive decision, is a negative thought.
Eknath Easwaran
#40. I KNEW I MUST do all as I was told, yet something burned inside me, a seed of defiance that must have derived from a long-ago ancestor. Perhaps my mind was inflamed from the books I had read and the worlds I had imagined.
Alice Hoffman
#41. The idea that one can go to the fossil record and expect to empirically recover an ancestor-descendant sequence, be it of species, genera, families, or whatever, has been, and continues to be, a pernicious illusion.
Gareth J. Nelson
#42. Our ancestors survive somewhere in our faces, she thought. If you look like your mother as a child, you end up as your father when you age. When you no longer recognise your face, it's because an unknown ancestor has taken up residence for a while.
Henning Mankell
#43. I'm a 10th-generation Texan. My ancestor - Andrew Kent - fought at the Alamo.
Jessica Collins
#44. Searching for alternative life on Earth might seem misconceived, because there is excellent evidence that every kind of life so far studied evolved from a common ancestor that lived billions of years ago. Yet most of the life that exists on Earth has never been properly classified.
Paul Davies
#45. Believe something is impossible,' said his ancestor calmly, 'and you will surely fail. But believe in yourself and you can do anything.
S.F. Said
#46. An oak tree and I are made of the same stuff. If you go far enough back, we have a common ancestor. The
Carl Sagan
#47. I'd rather have an ape for an ancestor than a bishop.
Thomas Huxley
#48. Ancestor. In fact, this clock tells us that all seven billion people alive today can trace their maternal lineage to one woman who lived in Africa 170,000 years ago, dubbed Mitochondrial Eve.
Sam Kean
#49. About Sun Tzu himself this is all that Ssu-ma Ch'ien has to tell us in this chapter. But he proceeds to give a biography of his descendant, Sun Pin, born about a hundred years after his famous ancestor's death, and also the outstanding military genius of his time.
Sun Tzu
#50. He did not know that the Old One was his father, for such a relationship was utterly beyond his understanding, but as he looked at the emaciated body he felt a dim disquiet that was the ancestor of sadness.
Arthur C. Clarke
#51. Looking, acting, and ultimately being Prep is not restricted to an elite minority lucky enough to attend prestigious private schools, just because an ancestor or two happened to arrive here on the Mayflower. You don't even have to be a registered Republican.
Lisa Birnbach
#52. I feel the nights stretching away
thousands long behind the days
till they reach the darkness where
all of me is ancestor.
Annie Finch
#53. Each county has usually some family, or personage, supposed to have been favoured or plagued, especially by the phantoms, as the Hackets of Castle Hacket, Galway, who had for their ancestor a fairy, or John-o'-Daly of Lisadell, Sligo, who wrote Eilleen Aroon,
W.B.Yeats
#55. The ancestor of every action is thought; when we understand that we begin to comprehend that our world is governed by thought and that everything without had its counterpart originally within the mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#56. I regard Abraham as my ancestor. Some of the greatest inspiration I have got has come from what we call the Old Testament prophets and what Jews would say "our prophets."
Desmond Tutu
#57. Practical in our expectations of the Criminal Law. ... [For] we have merely to imagine, by some trick of time travel, meeting our earliest hominid ancestor, Adam, a proto-man, short of stature, luxuriantly furred, newly bipedal, foraging about on the African
William Landay
#58. You can dig through public records and other documents to find out if a certain person had an Aryan grandmother, but there's no way to tell if that grandmother's Eocene ancestor was a sinanthropus or a pithecanthropus.
Stanislaw Lem
#59. By comparing the human and chimp genomes, we can see the process of evolution clearly in the changes (in DNA) since we diverged from our common ancestor.
Bob Waterston
#60. I would have thought that a book that begins "Dear God" would immediately have been identified as a book about the desire to encounter, to hear from, the Ultimate Ancestor. Perhaps it is a sign of our times that this was infrequently the case.
Alice Walker
#61. The ancestor to every action is a thought." As
Wayne W. Dyer
#62. When two strangers in a tribal society want to trade, they will often establish trust by appealing to a common god, mythical ancestor or totem animal.
Yuval Noah Harari
#63. I've run the marathon several times, so I definitely don't look like the Great Ancestor!
George Takei
#64. Religion and science have a common ancestor - ignorance.
A.C. Grayling
#65. Be a good ancestor. Stand for something bigger than yourself. Add value to the Earth during your sojourn.
Marian Wright Edelman
#66. Sometimes I began to wonder if she was taking vengeance on behalf of her ancestor women whom her ancestor men turned into sex slaves and baby making machines.
S.A. David
#67. For over two billion years, through the apparent fancy of her endless differentiations and metamorphosis the Cell, as regards its basic physiological mechanisms, has remained one and the same. It is life itself, and our true and distant ancestor.
Albert Claude
#68. We share a common ancestor with chimps that is not shared by mandrills, we share a common ancestor with mandrills that is not shared by bushbabies, and on and on and on, to the ancestor we share with nematode worms that is not shared with oak trees.
Simon Barnes
#69. The impossibility of a sequel ever recapturing everything - or anything - about its ancestor never stopped legions of writers from trying, or hordes of readers and publishers from demanding more of what they previously enjoyed.
Paul Di Filippo
#70. Yes, evolution by descent from a common ancestor is clearly true. If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things.
Francis Collins
#71. In other words Jesus went into the desert to confront His enemy and throw down the gauntlet. He would prove Himself to be the legitimate shepherd of Israel by overcoming the temptations that had undone all of Israel's previous kings, including His mighty ancestor, King David.
Charles R. Swindoll
#72. A very long time ago, some 2.5 million years B.C., the mother of human species as we know it, our ultimate ancestor, appeared in East Africa ... She was four feet tall and probably black..
Norman F. Cantor
#73. The Ojibways have great respect for the Bear. According to their legends, in the distant past the Bear had a human form and was in fact an ancestor of the Ojibways. Therefore he understands the Indian language and will never attack or fight any Indian if he is addressed properly.
Norval Morrisseau
#74. I envy those Hindus and Buddhists who have in their religion philosophy and ancestor worship which build in the believer a continuity with the past, and that most important ingredient in the building of a nation - memory.
F. Sionil Jose
#75. No one alive today has a single ancestor in his or her past who died in infancy. We are the champions, my friend!
Daniel J. Levitin
#76. We are the children of many sires, and every drop of blood in us in its turn betrays its ancestor.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#77. We hope to find more pieces of the puzzle which will shed light on the connection between this upright, walking ape, our early ancestor, and modern man.
Richard Leakey
#78. Picasso is what is going to happen and what is happening; he is posterity and archaic time, the distant ancestor and our next-door neighbor. Speed permits him to be two places at once, to belong to all the centuries without letting go of the here and now.
Octavio Paz
#79. Orthodox devotions that do not let in the light of modern knowledge are no more than a form of ancestor worship.
E.L. Doctorow
#80. The former King Louis XVI, who, after titles were abolished, was now simply called "Louis Capet" - a mocking reference to his distant ancestor Hugh Capet, who had assumed the throne in the year 987.
Tom Reiss
#81. Someone accompanies every soul from the other side when it enters this place. Usually it is an ancestor with whom that child shares traits and gifts
Joy Harjo
#82. Peer pressure is nothing compared
to ancestor pressure.
Pickles
#83. We were not the victims of ancestor worship. We had the benefits of a fresh start.
Matthew D. Miller
#84. Marvelous as may be the power of my dog to understand my moods, deathless as his affection and fidelity, his mental state is as unsolved a mystery to me as it was to my remotest ancestor.
William James
#85. And yet Xiao Li always spoke of her mother as if her image were mounted in a red-and-gold picture frame resting on a shrine in the corner of a tidy house, to be venerated and pleased at all times, like a deceased ancestor ever-present and scrutinizing her progeny.
Victor Robert Lee
#86. Then came a volley of colorful abuse, delivered in such an imperious voice, at at such a volume, that Terentia's distant ancestor, who had commanded the Roman line against Hannibal at Cannae a century and a half before, must surely have sat bolt upright in his tomb.
Robert Harris
#87. A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man who plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric ...
Thomas Huxley
#88. Anyone - your daddy or mine, your ancestor or mine, your god or mine - who bays for blood of "infidels" is an a***ole. And non-divine.
Fakeer Ishavardas
#89. Behind everything in London is something else, and, behind that, is something else still; and so on through the centuries, so that London as we see her is only the latest manifestation of other Londons, and to lover her is to plunge into ancestor-worship.
Henry Vollam Morton
#90. The first American ancestor of our name was a younger son of these old Devonshire people, and came to the Virginia colony in the reign of Charles the First.
John Sergeant Wise
#91. Chinese culture in general is not very religious. Confucianism is more a code of ethics than a religion, and ancestor worship is a way for parents to control you even after they're dead.
David Henry Hwang
#92. But it really wasn't until three to four years later, when we had an opportunity in the lab to make very detailed observations, and comparisons with other fossil discoveries, that we realized she was a new species of human ancestor.
Donald Johanson
#93. To live in Portsmouth without possessing a family portrait done by Copley is like living in Boston without having an ancestor in the old Granary Burying-Ground. You can exist, but you cannot be said to flourish.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#94. If you share a common ancestor with somebody, you're related to them. It doesn't mean that you're going to invite them to the family reunion, but it means that you share DNA. I think it's fascinating.
Henry Louis Gates
#95. I just want to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, so that when I'm long gone my great-great-grandchildren can walk up to it and say, "That's my ancestor." That will be my legacy.
Tracy Morgan
#96. Like Adam, our first conspicuous ancestor, I must begin, and lay the blame upon a woman; I am glad to recognize that I differ from the father of my sex in no important particular, being as manlike as most of his sons.
Owen Wister
#97. Since our first, furry ancestor scraped flint on stone and banished night with fire, we have climbed heavenward on a ladder made of our own arrogance.
Justin Cronin
#98. When I realized, in 1978, that Lucy did represent a new species of human ancestor, and that I had an opportunity to name this new species, I realized this was a revolutionary step in understanding human origins.
Donald Johanson
#99. If the second dinosaur to the left of the tall cycad tree had not happened to sneeze and thereby fail to catch the tiny, shrew-like ancestor of all the mammals, we should none of us be here.
Richard Dawkins
#100. Building the future holds more attraction than ancestor worship, whichever ancestor we're talking about.
Douglas Alexander
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