Quotes About Descent

#1. I believe the evidence strongly supports common descent. But the root question remains unanswered: What has caused complex systems to form?

Michael Behe

#2. mid-descent testing out some unassisted flight epiphany that came to him as he slept.

Allan J. Ashinoff

#3. About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.

Annie Dillard

#4. I am not sure that any sight or sound on earth is as exquisite as the hushed descent of a sky full of snow.

Parker J. Palmer

#5. If not consciously acknowledged and mourned, uncertainty about one's descent can cause great anxiety and unrest, all the more so if, as in Alois's case, it is linked with an ominous rumor that can neither be proven nor completely refuted

Alice Miller

#6. The sluices of the grog-shop are fed from the wine-glasses in the parlor, and there is a lineal descent from the gentleman who hiccoughs at his elegant dinner-table to the sot who makes a bed of the gutter.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

#7. It may, perhaps, be fairly questioned, whether any other portion of the population of the earth could have endured the privations, sufferings and horrors of slavery, without having become more degraded in the scale of humanity than the slaves of African descent.

Frederick Douglass

#8. If real experience has triggered your descent into depression, you have a human yen to understand it even when you have ceased to experience it; the limited of experience that is achieved with chemical pills is not tantamount to a cure.

Andrew Solomon

#9. Of the 545 Lok Sabha seats, two are reserved for Indians of European descent and filled up through nominations.

Francis Barclay

#10. Honey, love isn't like rappeling into a cave, where you can control your descent and how deep you go. It's just falling into the hole.

Shannon Stacey

#11. But very few ordeals are redemptive and I doubt if the descent into hell teaches anything new. It can only hasten processes which are already in existence, and usually this just means that it degrades. You see, in hell one lacks the energy for any good change. This indeed is the meaning of hell.

Iris Murdoch

#12. Genealogy: research by nobodies tracing their descent from a line of nobodies.

Stephen Gard

#13. There is no comparing the brutality and cynicism of today's pop culture with that of forty years ago: from High Noon to Robocop is a long descent.

Charles Krauthammer

#14. The same trade generally passes down from father to son, inclinations often following descent: but if any man's genius lies another way he is, by adoption, translated into a family that deals in the trade to which he is inclined;

Thomas More

#15. To understand Darwin's work, you have to distinguish between his theory of descent and his theory of natural selection. THe full name of the first is the theory of descent with modification. Some call it the fact of evolution, and some call it the doctrine of evolution.

Lee Spetner

#16. I find that most people that zealously defend Darwin have not actually read Darwin; definitely not Darwin's second book, The Descent of Man.

A.E. Samaan

#17. I've never understood why the end of a relationship - especially one involving children - has to immediately signal a descent into hatred and toxicity.

John Niven

#18. Milton says, that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods, and their descent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. For poetry is not "Devil's wine," but God's wine.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#19. Americans have almost been conditioned to believe that the majority of people who seek to do us harm are those of Muslim descent.

Bennie Thompson

#20. Mitochondrial genes act like a female surname, which enables us to trace our ancestry down the female line in the way some families try to trace their descent down the male line from William the Conqueror, or Noah, or Mohammed.

Nick Lane

#21. Crossing the Penobscot, one found a visible descent in the scale of humanity.

Francis Parkman

#22. High descent and meritorious deeds, unless united to wealth, are as useless as seaweed.

Horace

#23. The descent into Hell is easy

Virgil

#24. The descent to hell is easy and those who begin by worshipping power, soon worship evil.

C.S. Lewis

#25. Thinking no more about it, he stepped off into that cool space, that fast descent to her, with nothing in his mind but a memory of a curve of her shoulder, naked, as he had never seen it.

Patricia Highsmith

#26. Something is very, very wrong with American culture. The signs are everywhere. I think the country is in almost terminal descent.

Randall Robinson

#27. 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

#28. Facilis descensus Averni," he whispered, his ominous and preternatural words striking her very soul. "The descent to Hell is easy.

Sylvain Reynard

#29. There was no half-assing a descent into hell.

Robyn Schneider

#30. My dad is from Japanese descent, my mom is from Swedish descent and, through marriages and divorces, a pretty multicultural family - a lot of Spanish speakers in the family.

Cary Fukunaga

#31. The creation of art requires descent into the dark.

Doug Dorst

#32. In the world of the celebrity, the hierarchy of publicity has replaced the hierarchy of descent and even of great wealth.

C. Wright Mills

#33. If the present generation, or any other, are disposed to be slaves, it does not lessen the right of the succeeding generation to be free: wrongs cannot have a legal descent.

Thomas Paine

#34. Because deception requires both bold lies and lies of omission, it stains the soul, muddies the conscience, blurs the vision, and puts you at risk of headlong descent into greater darkness. As a boy, I could not have put

Dean Koontz

#35. She had been a comet; and her blazing descent through dark skies had been plain for all to see.

Susanna Clarke

#36. The sun had begun its descent toward the horizon, and the sounds of the carnival played like a familiar song behind me.

Amanda Hocking

#37. I sung of Chaos and Eternal Night,
Taught by the heav'nly Muse to venture down
The dark descent, and up to reascend ...

John Milton

#38. From yon blue heaven above us bent, The grand old gardener and his wife Smile at the claims of long descent.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

#39. Deconstructing the concept of race not only conflicts with people's tendency to classify and build family histories according to common descent but also ignores the work of biologists studying non-human species.

J. Philippe Rushton

#40. your mind becomes a supercomputer capable of calculating the gyrations of your car, multiplying that by the speed of the fall over the angle of descent, factoring in Newton's laws of motion and, in a split second, coming to the panicked conclusion that this is gonna hurt like hell.

Andrew Davidson

#41. He who boasts of his descent, praises the deed of another.

Seneca The Younger

#42. Man has regarded woman as his tool. She has learnt to be his tool and in the end found it is easy and pleasurable to be such, because when one drags another in his fall, the descent is easy.

Mahatma Gandhi

#43. Then since the autopilot will have it trimmed out to fly in a straight line, the glider will begin what the pilot calls a controlled descent. That kind of a descent, I tell him, would be nice for a change.

Chuck Palahniuk

#44. You are my angel and my damnation; in your presence I reach divine ecstasy and in your absence I descent to hell.

Isabel Allende

#45. Mitochondrial DNA, which is a sort of abridged version of DNA, is passed directly from mother to child, so it's something that can be looked at to trace matrilineal descent.

Elizabeth Kolbert

#46. Contrary to what certain governments say, human rights are universal. Arbitrary detention, torture and discrimination hurt the human dignity of anybody, whatever his or her country of origin, religion, descent, or any other ground.

Shirin Ebadi

#47. Racism is an attack on the very notion of the universality of human rights. It systematically denies certain people the enjoyment of their full human rights because of their colour, race, ethnicity, descent or national origin.

Irene Khan

#48. Happy in all that ragged, loose collapse of water, the fountain, its effortless descent and flatteries of spray ...

Richard Wilbur

#49. I will follow him to hell, and that is saying not a little, as I believe him entirely capable of the descent.

Alexandre Dumas

#50. Between the desire
And the spasm,
Between the potency
And the existence,
Between the essence
And the descent,
Falls the Shadow.

T. S. Eliot

#51. The descent of sport into spectacle is not unique to the age of genetic engineering. But it illustrates how performance-enhancing technologies, genetic or otherwise, can erode the part of athletic and artistic performance that celebrates natural talents and gifts.

Michael J. Sandel

#52. No country in Europe has a larger proportion of men and women of immigrant descent, mainly from the African continent and mainly Muslim: an estimated six to seven million of them, or more than 10% of the population.

Timothy Garton Ash

#53. We twentieth-century Mexicans, even those of pure Indian descent, look on the pre-Columbian world as a world on the other side, not only distant in time but across the cultural divide.

Octavio Paz

#54. O slavish man! will you not bear with your own brother, who has God for his Father, as being a son from the same stock, and of the same high descent? But if you chance to be placed in some superior station, will you presently set yourself up for a tyrant?

Epictetus

#55. Paleness is always looked upon as a strong proof of aristocratic descent and distinguished breeding.

Alexandre Dumas

#56. Danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration ... and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose - as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to sniveling and giggles.

Joseph Conrad

#57. I'm of Filipino, Spanish, and Chinese descent, and was raised on Hawaii.

Tia Carrere

#58. Recurrent descent into insanity is not a wholly attractive feature of capitalism.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#59. Jesus is the descent of God to our lives, just as they are, not the ascent of our lives to God, hoping he might approve when he sees how hard we try.

Eugene H. Peterson

#60. A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians.

William James

#61. I have made a long enough descent into the void to speak with certainty. There is nothing but beauty
and beauty has only one perfect expression, Poetry. All the rest is a lie.

Stephane Mallarme

#62. Love is the Creator's greatest invention and, as St. Ambrose said, that is especially true when our entire spirit and body are involved in this extraordinary rite, which is after all the rite of our own birth and of our descent.

Dario Fo

#63. It?s a beautiful descent in a 737, into the Bitterroot Valley, following the Clark Fork River, on a perfect golden autumn day .

Garrison Keillor

#64. Who climbs the mountain does not always climb.The winding road slants downward many a time;Yet each descent is higher than the last.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

#65. As the interned American citizens of Japanese descent learned, the Bill of Rights provided them with little protection when it was needed.

Glenn Reynolds

#66. Eph 4:9 The fact that he ascended confirms his victorious descent into the deepest pits of human despair. [In John 3:13: "No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, even the son of man." All mankind originates from above; we are anouthen, from above.

Francois Du Toit

#67. I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule.

W.S. Gilbert

#68. When we say Afro American, we include everyone in the Western Hemisphere of African descent. South America is America. Central America is America. South America has many people in it of African descent.

Malcolm X

#69. If you should ever be blessed to be far enough from the cacophony of civilization when a heavy snow falls, you can even hear the very music of the iced dew's delicate descent. It is the repainting of a landscape in a thousand hues of white. It is the dance of the wind.

R.C. Sproul Jr.

#70. Christ is at once the spotless descent of God into men and the sinless ascent of man into God, and the Holy Spirit is the Agent by whom this is accomplished.

John G. Lake

#71. You've seen my descent, now watch my rising.

Jalaluddin Rumi

#72. The descent to the infernal regions is easy enough, but to retrace one's steps, and reach the air above, there's the rub.

Virgil

#73. In the course of crime ... the descent is rapid.

Frederick Marryat

#74. My life has been one long descent into respectability.

Mandy Rice-Davies

#75. What will happen to the flowers, now that you are gone? The earth that clings to the steps, the tulsi that begins to sprout. The colors that brighten the darkness of the stairs, the scents that perfume the air. Must I climb alone the petal-strewn trail of your descent?

Manil Suri

#76. The descent to barbarism had begun with Rotterdam. It ended with Dresden and then with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Whatever moral differences had existed when the war began were erased by its end. The victors had been morally conquered by the enemy.

David McReynolds

#77. By the time I could see again, the captain had announced the final descent into Seattle. Couldn't they find a less ominous phrase for it? I don't like flying as it is, even without the implication that before landing I might want to have all my worldly and spiritual affairs in order.

C.E. Murphy

#78. The idea that somehow people of African descent are not part of the same species as whites was accepted by European men of science in the early modern period.

Manisha Sinha

#79. It has made mincemeat of Barack Obama's pose of thoughtfulness. It has demonstrated that he lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the most basic economic realities. It has dramatized environmentalism's descent into infantilism.

George Will

#80. The gates of Hell are open night and day; smooth the descent and easy is the way.

Virgil

#81. My grandfather is Portuguese. He betrayed what was expected of him and married my grandmother of African descent on my father's side.

Fred D'Aguiar

#82. A single bead of water rolled along the length of his spine and glided down the powerful lines of his body. Mariel moistened her lips and watched its seductive descent, overwhelmed with the temptation to trace its path with the tip of her tongue.

Madeline Martin

#83. The Dr. King holiday is not just for black people, African-Americans or people of African descent.

LZ Granderson

#84. Boys, the first drink is a boon, the second is a gamble, the third is poor judgment, and then the rate of descent gets steep

Garrison Keillor

#85. Kings made tombs more splendid than houses of the living, and counted old names in the rolls of their descent dearer than the names of sons. Childless

J.R.R. Tolkien

#86. Ramona stepped back into her closet, slid the door shut, pressed an imaginary button, and when her imaginary elevator had made its imaginary descent, stepped out onto the real first floor and raced a real problem. Her mother and father were leaving for Parents' Night.

Beverly Cleary

#87. Every worthy act is difficult. Ascent is always difficult. Descent is easy and often slippery.

Mahatma Gandhi

#88. Those who boast of their descent, brag on what they owe to others.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

#89. III THE DESCENT BECKONS The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned. - William Carlos Williams, The Descent

Cassandra Clare

#90. I knew how one climbing the mountain of worldly success can slip down into the river below without being conscious of the descent till he is already drowning.

Diego Rivera

#91. A single laugh burst from his lips, and a fin spray of blood settled over his chin. "Like this?"
His legs faltered. He tried to stop his descent, but his arm gave way and he crumpled, rolling to his back. It's simple enough. Like calls to like. The Darkling's own power. Morozova's own blood.

Leigh Bardugo

#92. No one should deny the danger of the descent, but it can be risked. No one need risk it, but it is certain that someone will. And let those who go down the sunset way do so with open eyes, for it is a sacrifice which daunts even the gods. Yet every descent is followed by an ascent.

Carl Jung

#93. I wish to descend in the social scale.
High society is low society.
I am a social climber
climbing downward
And the descent is difficult.
(- Junkman's Obbligato)

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#94. There is a descent from God through the world to animals, and an ascent from animals through the world to God. He is the highest point of the scale, pure act and active power, the purest light.

Giordano Bruno

#95. Miracles occur, If you dare to call those spasmodic Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again, The long wait for the angel, For that rare, random descent.

Sylvia Plath

#96. It's a glorious evening, warm but not too close, the sun starting its lazy descent, shadows lengthening and the light just beginning to burnish the trees with gold.

Paula Hawkins

#97. Life is so complicated a game that the devices of skill are liable to be defeated at every turn by air-blown chances, incalculable as the descent of thistle-down.

George Eliot

#98. The great design of Jesus' descent into hell is to rouse
people out of their deep sleep, to deliver them from sin and death.

Tim Liwanag

#99. Bryne want kill dinosaur, i said pantomiming what i thought passed for a descent dinosaur killing motion.
For the first time in weeks, Ali laughed. Go on. And if you're very good, Ali show Bryn big heaping secret. fiiiiiirrrre. Make tasty warm dinosaur meat.

Jennifer Lynn Barnes

#100. If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy.

Albert Camus