Ancestor Quotes & Sayings

The search for knowledge is in our genes. It was put there by our distant ancestors who spread across the world, and it's never going to be quenched. — E. O. Wilson

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

Biochemists assume that the three cellular kingdoms evolved from a single common ancestor, because the alternative of supposing an independent origin of life two or more times presents still greater difficulties. The common ancestor is merely hypothetical, as are the numerous transitional intermediate forms that would have to connect such enormously different groups to the ancestor. From a Darwinist viewpoint all these hypothetical creatures are a logical necessity, but there is no empirical confirmation that they existed. — Phillip E. Johnson

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

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

Religion and science have a common ancestor - ignorance. — A.C. Grayling

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

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

But you see, our society is still trapped in this binary, black/white logic and that has had some very positive implications for our generation. It's had some very negative ones as well and one of the negative ones is that it creates enormous identity problems for people who have one black ancestor and all white ancestors for example. — Henry Louis Gates

As my ancestors are free from slavery, I am free from the slavery of religion. — Butterfly McQueen

In the center is Judge Theodore Sedgwick, the first of the Stockbridge Sedgwicks and a great-great-great-grandfather of Edie's and of mine, is buried under his tombstone, a high rising obelisk, and his wife Pamela is beside him. They are like the king and queen on a chessboard, and all around them like a pie are more modest stones, put in layers, back and round in a circle. The descendants of Judge Sedgwick, from generation unto generation, are all buried with their heads facing out and their feet pointing in toward their ancestor. The legend is that on Judgement Day when they arise and face the Judge, they will have to see no one but Sedgwicks. — Jean Stein

Every human alive today came from a single mother in Africa, who lived about two hundred thousand years ago. Later, when the sea levels receded about ninety thousand years ago, a small tribe of a few hundred traveled out of the plains of Africa. After crossing the Red Sea through the Gate of Grief passageway, they fanned out and populated the entire world. How can there be any strangers among us when we all share a single common ancestor? — Nina Wirk

The truth is that we all are one, that all of us together create god, that god is not man's ancestor, but his descendant. — Nikos Kazantzakis

Our family became spelled after my ancestor pixed off two evil witch sisters. The witches' curse was supposed to doom my great- great- great grandmother to turn evil and torch the world - except the spell wasn't worded right. It didn't spec-ify which Emerald princess. So ever since, all the girls in the Emerald family have been stuck inside, since there's no way to know what generation will inherit the curse. — Betsy Schow

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

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. — Henry Fairfield Osborn

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. — Quammen, David

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

We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration — Milan Kundera

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

I am something of a connoisseur of the country pile and I must say {he} had done himself remarkably well. At a guess I would say it was from the reign of Queen Anne and had been bunged up by some bewigged ancestor awash with loot from the War of the Spanish Succession or some such lucrative away fixture. — Sebastian Faulks

The entire hominid collection known today would barely cover a billiard table, ... the collection is so tantalizingly incomplete, and the specimens themselves often so fragmented and inconclusive, that more can be said about what is missing than about what is present ... but ever since Darwin's work inspired the notion that fossils linking modern man and extinct ancestor would provide the most convincing proof of human evolution, preconceptions have led evidence by the nose in the study of fossil man. — John Reader

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

All of today's DNA, strung through all the cells of the earth, is simply an extension and elaboration of [the] first molecule. — Lewis Thomas

Orthodox devotions that do not let in the light of modern knowledge are no more than a form of ancestor worship. — E.L. Doctorow

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

If we presume that the boundary of the universe is a kind of surrounding wall,
then we think like ancestors who thought there's abyss at the edge of flat earth. — Toba Beta

Whenever those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral foundations of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises. And consequently it is possible to predict with confidence that in the apparently quite unlikely contexts of bureaucratically managed modern societies there will periodically emerge social movements informed by just that kind of prophetic irrationalism of which Nietzsche's thought is the ancestor. Indeed just because and insofar as contemporary Marxism is Weberian in substance we can expect prophetic irrationalisms of the left as well as of the Right. — Alasdair MacIntyre

We should have known much more than our ancestors.
But if we learn less, we're much more stupid than them. — Toba Beta

I am proud of all my ancestresses. They showed us that it's possible to do great things and still live a happy, pleasure filled life. So can I; so can you. — Maria Rodale

Wherefore should I not offer my congratulations? But the very fact of them being Sayyids, those fountains of felicity, demands heartly exertions in support of Islam and their ancestor Muhammad the Lord of Apostles. Let two Kaftans of honor for the two brothers be issued from my wardrobe and let them be sent with two swords, jewel-hilted and provided with pearl mounted belts, let Jamdat-ul-Mulk write much praise and congratulations when sending these presents. — Aurangzeb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don't rock chains our ancestors did it for us — Phonte

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

That's what Jesus meant," whispers the ghost of Slothrop's first American ancestor William, "venturing out on the Sea of Galilee. He saw it from the lemming point of view. Without the millions who had plunged and drowned, there could have been no miracle. The successful loner was only the other part of it: the last piece to the jigsaw puzzle, whose shape had already been created by the Preterite, like the last blank space on the table."
"Wait a minute. You people didn't have jigsaw puzzles."
"Aw, shit. — Thomas Pynchon

We are the children of many sires, and every drop of blood in us in its turn betrays its ancestor. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

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

In many parts of the world, ghosts are not considered to be a creation of local folklore, but a fact of life. In China the dead are understood to co-exist with the living, a belief which gave rise to the practice of ancestor worship, while in South America the deceased are honoured with annual festivals known as the Day of the Dead which suggests that the material world and the spirit world might not be as distinct as we might like to believe. In the Eastern and Asiatic religions it is believed that death is not the end, but simply a transition from one state of being to another. The Hindu Upanishads, for example, liken each human soul to a lump of salt taken from the ocean which must ultimately return to the source. — Paul Roland

If I have courage, it is because I have faith in the knowledge of my ancestors. — Mau Piailug

The first known prosecution took place in Egypt around 1300 BC, for a crime that would today constitute practicing medicine without a license. (That supernatural medic was male.) Descended from Celtic horned gods and Teutonic folklore, Pan's distant ancestor the devil was not yet on the scene. He arrived with the New Testament, a volume notably free of witches. Nothing in the Bible connects the two, a job that fell, much later, to the church. — Stacy Schiff

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

Today's events are tomorrow's history, yet events seen by the naked eye lack the depth and breadth of human struggles, triumphs and suffering. Writing history is writing the soul of the past ... so that the present generation may learn from past mistakes, be inspired by their ancestor's sacrifices, and take responsibility for the future. — Epifanio De Los Santos

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

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

Every man serves a useful purpose: a miser, for example, makes a wonderful ancestor. — Laurence J. Peter

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

We regard the earldom as an important family honor. But my father is a good man precisely because he is a good man, not because he possesses an ancient title. And as for Lord Blackwood, I find his title all the more appealing because it represents the nobility of the man standing before you, not of some long-dead ancestor. — Julia Quinn

A fossil is so powerful. It's moving. This is my ancestor. The naturalist is moved by the fossil ... not the cross. — Greg Graffin

The hero's will is not that of his ancestors nor of his society, but his own. This will to be oneself is heroism. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Honor among thieves is the ancestor of all honor. — John McCarthy

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

Artificial selection turned the wolf into the shepherd, and the wild grasses into wheat and corn. In fact, almost every plant and animal that we eat today was bred from a wild, less edible ancestor. If artificial selection can work such profound changes in only ten or fifteen thousand years, what can natural selection do operating over billions of years? The answer is all the beauty and diversity of life. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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

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

We were not the victims of ancestor worship. We had the benefits of a fresh start. — Matthew D. Miller

Not a single one of your ancestors died young. They all copulated at least once. — Richard Dawkins

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

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

Two million years ago, several proto-human lineages had coexisted side by side until a shake-up left only one. It now appears that a similar shake-up occurred within the last 60,000 years, and that all of us alive in the world today are descended from the winner of that upheaval. What was the last missing ingredient whose acquisition helped our ancestor to win? — Jared Diamond

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

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

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

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

Those who have not been trained in chemistry201 or medicine may not realize how difficult the problem of cancer treatment really is. It is almost - not quite, but almost - as hard as finding some agent that will dissolve away the left ear, say, and leave the right ear unharmed. So slight is the difference between the cancer cell and its normal ancestor. - William Woglom Life — Siddhartha Mukherjee

I am not my self, I am the result of all my ancestors. — Santiago Martinez Delgado

My first American ancestor, gentlemen, was an Indian-an early Indian. Your ancestors skinned him alive, and I am an orphan. All those Salem witches were ancestors of mine. Your people made it tropical for them ... The first slave brought into New England out of Africa was an ancestor of mine-for I am a mixed breed, an infinitely shaded and exquisite Mongrel. — Mark Twain

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

You'd better stay determined, because that's how our ancestors got us where we are. — Marian Wright Edelman

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

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

We are the ancestors of the future and what we do now will have an impact. — Luisah Teish

We are the ancestors of those gardening the universe. — Vanna Bonta

As I am from Hawai'i, the ocean is part of my culture and who I am. My ancestors were great ocean explorers. — Nainoa Thompson

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

The different human peoples did not evolve out of a common ancestor; they were each born out of the womb of their own homeland. We appeared in different parts of the world at the same time. Each group was as much a part of their environment as the other animals and plants of the region. — Eliot Cowan

Maybe. Maybe not. Look, the Latin name for this fish is Carcharodon carcharias, okay? The closest ancestor we can find for it is something called Carcharodon megalodon, a fish that existed maybe thirty or forty thousand years ago. We have fossil teeth from megalodon. They're six inches long. That would put the fish at between eighty and a hundred feet. And the teeth are exactly like the teeth you see in great whites today. What I'm getting at is, suppose the two fish are really one species. What's to say megalodon is really extinct? Why should it be? — Peter Benchley

If you look only as Genesis as an allegory, you have a major problem, because if it's an allegory, then tell me who our ancestor was? If Abraham was real, then from Abraham if Adam isn't real, if it's just an allegory, it's just a story, then what's the real Adam who really fell in a garden and really sinned? Where did we come from? — Ken Ham

Taking Root

I am no stranger to roots. In third grade, I punctured
a sweet potato's middle with toothpicks, suspended
it halfway in a cup of water until sprout-like whiskers

swam along its bottom. On day nine leaves crowned it.
I scooped out soil with my hands and buried it up
to its neck. I've laid down my own in places

where corn and tomatoes grow in vacant lots,
where cilantro and basil thrive on window sills
and in cities balanced on ancestor's bones.

Roots are hardy travelers, adaptable: they float
on water, cohere to wood, burrow deep beneath
foundations, challenge floorboards.

from Second Skin — Diana Anhalt

To find anything comparable with our forthcoming ventures into space, we must go back far beyond Columbus, far beyond Odysseus-far, indeed, beyond the first ape-man. We must contemplate the moment, now irrevocably lost in the mists of time, when the ancestor off all of us came crawling out of the sea. — Arthur C. Clarke

The most important question we must ask ourselves is, 'Are we being good ancestors?' — Jonas Salk

Be a good ancestor. Stand for something bigger than yourself. Add value to the Earth during your sojourn. — Marian Wright Edelman

Most curious is the way that Y/surname patterns differ between countries. In Britain, on average, a man who has the same surname as another is significantly more likely to have a similar Y chromosome, and therefore a common ancestor, than he would with someone of a different surname. But there's a twist: The Y similarity depends on the frequency of the surname within the population. If you are a Smith, for example, the rule does not apply. — Christine Kenneally

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

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

My mother's family is passionate about visiting and cleaning the graves of their deceased. Once a year, the Peeks and the Nolens would gather to clean the tombstones and plant flowers at the grave sites of their people. Once, in Piedmont, when I was a little boy, I was helping to clean a grave of an ancestor of my grandfather named Jerry Mire Peek. When I asked my cousin Clyde whom this unknown relation was named after, he said, He was named after the prophet Jerry Mire. — Pat Conroy

Gro Rollag was no beauty, but she was a strong capable young woman with a long face, prominent cheekbones, high forehead, and a kindly intelligent look in her rather narrow eyes. According to family lore, she was not the most conscientious housekeeper because she preferred reading to housework. A love of books and reading ran in the family. Of all the possessions they were forced to sell or leave behind in Norway, what the Rollags remembered with deepest regret was the library they inherited from an eighteenth-century ancestor - lovely old books sold to pay for their passage to America. — David Laskin

If we go far enough back, any two people on Earth have a common ancestor. — Carl Sagan

We are all a complete mixture;yet at the same time,we are all related.Each gene can trace its own journey to a different common ancestor.This is a quite extraordinary legacy that we all have inherited from the people who lived before us.Our genes did not just appear when we were born.They have been carried to us by millions of individual lives over thousands of generations. — Bryan Sykes

What is a totem? It is as a rule an animal (whether edible and harmless or dangerous and feared) and more rarely a plant or a natural phenomenon (such as rain or water), which stands in a peculiar relation to the whole clan. In the first place, the totem is the common ancestor of the clan; at the same time it is their guardian spirit and helper, which sends them oracles and, if dangerous to others, recognizes and spares its own children. — Sigmund Freud

Snobs talk as if they had begotten their own ancestors. — Herbert Agar

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

Paul R. Linde in his 1994 book, Of Spirits and Madness: An American Psychiatrist in Africa. "Major mental illness cuts across all cultures," Linde writes. "Amazingly enough, or maybe not, acutely psychotic people in Zimbabwe appear very similar to those in San Francisco. . . . They suffer from disorganized thoughts, delusions, and hallucinations. The content of the symptoms, however, is very much different . . . Zimbabweans do not report hearing auditory hallucinations of Jesus Christ, rather they report hearing those of their ancestor spirits. They are not paranoid about the FBI, rather they are paranoid about witches and sorcerers."1 — Dick Russell