Quotes About Origins

I see myself as part English and part American, with a dash of Irish thrown in, and a pinch of Italian from my mother's ancestry.

It's a good rule of thumb, it seems to me: if you're not allowed to see where something comes from, don't put it in your mouth.

Thus, biologically speaking the American people are literally only half an immigrant people.

Emotionally, a person is tied to the land of his birth. It's only human.

I don't use the word 'renaissance'. It's flawed because in Latin, it's tied to the rebirth of Christ... It's a word that's tied to a European concept.

I think we were colonized by aliens 250,000 years ago, and they genetically altered our DNA to be primates into homo erectus and humans. I'm very interested in how we evolved so suddenly, which obviously ties in with the alien thing.

I have no ties to my dad. I had no communications with him; it didn't shape who I am or anything like that. I'm actually a product of my mom.

Myth is the threshold of history.

So if Adam and Eve are the parents of the whole human race, where did Cain's wife come from? After

I am not from Venus. . . . I am from a small town on the Serbo-Croation border.

It's fantastic to strive towards a nice life where you eat nice organic food and your children go to a nice school and you can afford nice clothes and nice perfume and the hypoallergenic make-up. But there's never a day goes by, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart, that I don't think about where I'm from.

A degenerate nobleman, or one that is proud of his birth, is like a turnip. There is nothing good of him but that which is underground.

And so there is no God but has been in the loins of past gods.

Israel's monomaniacal Spinoza worship is amusing and exasperating by turns. For a start, his insistence that Spinoza was the singular font of the Enlightenment leaves him without a story of the Enlightenment's intellectual or cultural origins. Every historian has to begin somewhere, but the fact that Israel begins with Spinoza, and then reduces most of what follows the philosopher to a footnote, leaves his account of the Enlightenment founded on something like immaculate conception.

There are infinite beginnings.

Point is, I invented me... maybe as a reaction to them... definitely as a reaction to them. I am myself in spite of my memories.

The expression working like a dog dates back to a time in America when men would rise early, then lie around all day and lick their balls.

I may not say it all the time or I may not pray as much as I need to, but I am not forgetting where I came from and how I got to be where I am today.

The creature called man has a strange history. He is not of one piece, nor was he born of a single moment in time. His elementary substance is stardust almost as old as the universe.

Almost everything comes from almost nothing.

Genius cannot escape the taint of its time more than a child the influence of its begetting.

Great issues develop from small beginnings.

Maps of Time attempts to assemble a coherent and accessible account of origins, a modern creation myth.

The seeds of who I am now had been planted. Fools aren't born, I wrote in my notebook one day during ethics class. They are watered and grown like weeds by institutions such as Christianity.