Quotes About Origins

Tradition is a fine thing. Nothing comes out of the blue, except perhaps thunderbolts and they are not really very useful things.

Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home.

I do not believe, then, that marriage was invented to oppress women any more than it was invented to protect them. In most cases, marriage probably originated as an informal way of organizing sexual companionship, child rearing, and the daily tasks of life.

The truth is that our way of celebrating the Christmas season does spring from myriad cultures and sources, from St. Nicholas to Coca-Cola advertising campaigns.

Stereotypes have their roots in truth.

The truth is very few of us are related to Napoleon or Cleopatra. Although, those are bad examples as I am actually descended from both of them.

Every misogynist came out of a woman.

Page 286: Common sense on this subject tends to be warded off by ritual invocation of the cliché that we are "a nation of immigrants." In fact, the United States is not a nation of immigrants, and never has been. At no point in American history have people born abroad constituted more than a minority of the U.S. population

You are what you eat eats.

I was born in Singapore, but I left at four so memories are hazy.

My mother is Lithuanian Australian, and my father was born in Singapore, but he is Pakistani / Saudi Arabian.

We were so poor when I was a kid that I had a sister who was stamped, 'Made In Japan.'

I come from a pretty scientific family. My sister is a neurologist and my brother is an engineer.

But if we begin thinking about the world being over 100 million years old, then it's absolutely by chance that you and I are sitting here alive today, while all the others are dead or have never been born.

In the very early Seventies and the very late Sixties, nobody out here was originally from L.A.

I guess my name was gonna be Michael Vernon Wells, and I came out, and my dad saw my nose. He always says that my nose right now is the same size as it was when I was born. So he had to name me Vernon. He's got a big schnozz on him, too.

My skepticism doesn't come from no one. There's a root to it, and it's my family.

Love comes from the strangest places.

The psychological origins of love are in attachment to parents and sexual partners. We do not attach to ourselves; we do not seek security and fulfillment in ourselves.

We are so used to the notion of our own inevitability as life's dominant species that it is hard to grasp that we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes. The one thing we have in common with all other living things is that for nearly four billion years our ancestors have managed to slip through a series of closing doors every time we needed them to.

One of the hardest ideas for humans to accept,' he says, 'is that we are not the culmination of anything. There is nothing inevitable about our being here. It is part of our vanity as humans that we tend to think of evolution as a process that, in effect, was programmed to produce us.

On a cooler sun on a primordial earth: I later learned that biologists, when they are feeling jocose, refer to this as the 'Chinese Resaturant Problem'--because we has a dim sun.

Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you.

In just 200 million years, possibly less, the Earth was essentially formed, though still molten and subject to constant bombardment from all the debris that remained floating about. At