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Birth Quotes

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Birth Quotes

“There is a certain class of people who prefer to say that their fathers came down in the world through their own follies than to boast that they rose in the world through their own industry and talents. It is the same shabby-genteel sentiment, the same vanity of birth which makes men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels rather than elevated apes.”

People Men World Believe Certain Father Class Talent Industry Birth Angel Rose Vanity Folly Sentiments Boast Apes Ancestry Shabby

Book:The Martyrdom of Man

Source: The Martyrdom of Man

“Birth and ancestry, and that which we have not ourselves achieved, we can scarcely call our own.”

Author:Ovid

“Some decent regulated pre-eminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth, is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolite.”

Given Birth Decent Unjust Preference Exclusive Unnatural Ancestry Appropriation Eminence

Author:Edmund Burke

“The egg it is the source of all To everyone's ancestral hall.”

Source Birth Eggs Halls Ancestry

Author:Clarence Day

“When real nobleness accompanies that imaginary one of birth, the imaginary seems to mix with real, and becomes real too.”

Real Seems Birth Imaginary Accompany Ancestry

Author:Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

“What is birth to a man if it shall be a stain to his dead ancestors to have left such an offspring?”

Ifs Men Left Birth Ancestor Stains Offspring Ancestry

Book:Aphorisms of Sir Philip Sidney: With Remarks

Source: Aphorisms of Sir Philip Sidney: With Remarks

“We are inescapably the result of a long heritage of learning, adaptation, mutation and evolution, the product of a history which predates our birth as a biological species and stretches back over many thousand millennia... Going further back, we share a common ancestry with our fellow primates; and going still further back, we share a common ancestry with all other living creatures and plants down to the simplest microbe. The further back we go, the greater the difference from external appearances and behavior patterns which we observe today.”

“Nobility of birth is like a cipher; it has no power in itself, like wealth or talent; but, it tells with all the power of a cipher when added to either of the other two.”

Two Wealth Talent Birth Nobility Ancestry Ciphers

Book:Life and Books: Or, Records of Thought and Reading

Source: Life and Books: Or, Records of Thought and Reading

“The function of the artist is to disturb. His duty is to arouse the sleeper, to shake the complacent pillars of the world. He reminds the world of its dark ancestry, and shows the world its present and points the way to its new birth. He is at once the product and preceptor of his times.”

World Way Shows Artist Dark Duty Products Birth Function Shakes Pillars Ancestry Complacent Sleepers

Author:Norman Bethune

“High birth is a thing which I never knew any one to disparage except those who had it not; and I never knew any one to make a boast of it who had anything else to be proud of.”

Proud Birth Be Proud Boast Ancestry

Author:William Warburton

“Darwin and his successors have railed against the fallacy of confusing the current utility of a trait with the reason the trait evolved. For example, Darwin argued that skull sutures in mammals did not evolve because they facilitate live birth; the sutures were in place well before live birth evolved. Checking the chronological order in which different traits evolved in a lineage is one way to test an adaptive hypothesis; the fact of common ancestry is what makes that checking possible.”