Quotes About Origins

To acknowledge the beginnings of people is a beautiful thing.

All my work begins with drawings.

Beirut is where I was born and raised.

My father was from Belfast; my mother was from Crossmolina. I grew up in Dublin.

I was born in Ambala Cantt., but my parents belong to Palwal.

My father belongs to Berhampur and my mother is from Uttar Pradesh.

The impetus for most fundamentalist movements—whether Mormon, Catholic, Evangelical Christian, Muslim, or Jewish—is a yearning to return to the mythical order and perfection of the original church.

It was not the Jew, of course, who invented the love poem, but the other way around.

Quizá no exista la carne. En su lugar, existe este animal, criado en esta granja, sacrificado en esta planta, vendido de este modo y consumido por esta persona.

Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was.

Our actual ultimate root is in our humanity, not in our personal genealogy.

No prince, how great soever, begets his predecessors, and the noblest rivers are not navigable to the fountain.

It is clear, then, that the Amorites of Canaan belonged to the same white race as the Libyans of Northern Africa, and like them preferred the mountains to the hot plains and valleys below. The Libyans themselves belonged to a race which can be traced through the peninsula of Spain and the western side of France into the British Isles.

The Jebusites ... belonged to one or other of these two great races; perhaps, indeed, to both (i.e., Amorites and Hittites).

Nobody knows exactly where the first chickens were domesticated – India, China, Thailand, Vietnam – somewhere around 10,000 years ago, which is to say at the birth of farming. The wild bird is a red jungle fowl, Gallus gallus (the French made it their national bird because of the similarity to Gaul, and because they still behave like chickens).

St. Petersburg—"Peter" to insiders—was renamed Petrograd at the start of the war in an attempt to erase its Germanic origins. From the first months of 1915, the atmosphere in the city had changed completely.

And this, they say, is how thirteen became the "baker's dozen"—a custom common for over a century, and alive in some places to this day.

We have a natural resentment toward government, which was how we were born

For whatever sets in motion societal activity originates in the intimate communal living of families in the same village or hamlet, in the same region or country.

The seven billion of us alive today are, according to all the evidence available to us, the last remaining group of human great apes from a set of at least four that existed 50,000 years ago.

We only have to go back a few dozen centuries to see that most of the 7 billion of us alive today are descended from a tiny handful of people, the population of a village.

For the sake of perspective, life has existed on Earth for about 3.9 billion years. The species Homo sapiens, of which you are a member, emerged a mere 300,000 years ago, as far as we know, in pockets in the east and north of Africa. Writing began about 6,000 years ago, in Mesopotamia, somewhere in what we now call the Middle East.

Something on the order of 107 billion modern humans have existed, though this number depends on when exactly you start counting. All of them—of us—are close cousins, because our species has a single African origin.

most recent common ancestor of everyone alive today on Earth lived only around 3,400 years ago.