Quotes About Forebears

We live in an open society. We pride ourselves on it, and so we should. An open society is distinguished by the fact that government may not keep information from its citizens, must allow the circulation of ideas. But what we have, we take for granted. What we are used to, we cease to value. Generations of our forebears fought for the freedom of ideas, so that we may have what we do have.

What was original sin? Was it more than an arbitrary pattern set in the loom, of talents and weaknesses, picked out from the warp of one's forebears?

We're tied to our heritage in a powerful way, and if we want to change our individual behavior or beliefs and heal ourselves, knowledge about our history becomes perhaps the most important data we need. In order to move forward, we must know what our forebears have passed on to us and what they've communicated to each other, both consciously and unconsciously, throughout the years.

The secret to economic growth lay in the fact that that each generation attacked Nature not only with its own energies and resources, but with the heritage of equipment accumulated by its forebears.

At present the dominant story, collectively speaking, is scientific, and one aspect of the mind is given credit for advancing human evolution: rational thought. If we pity our forebears for their difficulty in getting past superstition and myth, the future may pity us for glorifying the rational mind and neglecting the whole mind.

We're used to the wonders of today. Why, if our forebears were to arise and hear the radio, see television, and witness a jumbo jet landing at an airport, spitting and roaring in the pitch-black night, they would think us polytheists for sure.

The train passed through a series of tunnels. Because the overhead light fixtures had no bulbs in them, some people lit candles inside the tunnels, which dramatically illuminated their black, liquid eyes. There was a solemn, almost devotional cynicism to these eyes, reflecting, as though by a genetic process, all of the horrors witnessed by generation upon generation of forebears.

Whenever I give a talk about my work I am invariably asked who my influences are. Not what my influences are, but who. As if the gutter, misunderstandings, memories, sex, dreams, and books matter less than forebears do. After all, in terms of influences, it is as much the guy who mugged me on 10th Street, or my beloved dog who passed away much too early, as it was Giotto or Diane Arbus.

Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.

If you do not respect my past, then why should I respect yours? If you do not respect my culture, then why should I respect yours? If you do not respect my forebears, then why should I respect yours? And if you do not like what my society has produced, then why should I agree to your having a place in it?

To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.

Jonas began to laugh. "So actually, there could be parents-of-the-parents-of-the-parents-of-the parents?

and he imagines cars and rides them in his dreams, so lonely growing up among the imaginary automobiles and dead souls of Tarrytown to create out of his own imagination the beauty of his wild forebears - a mythology he cannot inherit.

For the entire course of evolution leading from our primitive mammalian forebears of a hundred million years ago to the single lineage that threaded its way to become the first Homo sapiens, the total number of individuals it required might have been one hundred billion. Unknowingly, they all lived and died for us. (21)

Today certain definite ideas are developing out of the Egyptian ideas. What is called Darwinism today did not arise because of external reasons. We are the same souls who, in Egypt, received the pictures of the animal forms of man's forebears. The old views have awakened again, but man has descended more deeply into the material world.

Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. [Commencement Address at Yale University, June 11 1962]

Do not believe in angels, Rien Conn, for they are all corrupted by the lies of the Builders, as your forebears were corrupted, too.

This is a problem for Irish writers--our literary forebears are enormous. They stand behind us like Easter Island statues, and we keep trying to measure up to them, leaping towards heights we can't possibly reach. I suppose that's a good thing, but it makes for a painful early life for the writer.

Only a hundred years ago the idea that an order might arise without a personal Author appeared so nonsensical to you that it inspired seemingly absurd jokes, like the one about the pack of monkeys hammering away at typewriters until the Encyclopedia Britannica emerged. I recommend that you devote some of your free time to compiling an anthology of just such jokes, which amused your forebears as pure nonsense but now turn out to be parables of Nature.

Hitler claimed ideological forebears in Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche;1 Stalin took his cues from Marx; the eugenicists took their ideas from Darwin and Comte.

We are responsible for our behavior, not that of our group, nor that of our ancestors. The arc of the universe does indeed bend toward justice, as King claimed, and we thus dishonor the sacrifices of our forebears when we suggest things are as bad or worse today than before the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

antecedents

Modern poets like Frost still want to make 'deep' statements; but they are also more sceptical of such high-sounding generalities than many of their forebears. So, rather like T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land , they gesture enigmatically to such profundities while at the same time being nervous of committing themselves to them.

Although European thinkers see the Greeks as their intellectual forebears, the Greeks themselves looked toward the East for the sources of true wisdom-to Egypt, Persia, and, during the early centuries of the common era, India.