Descent quotes:

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  • I'm of Filipino, Spanish, and Chinese descent, and was raised on Hawaii. -- Tia Carrere
  • My individual, psychological descent coincided, ironically, with my ascent into the public eye. -- Joni Mitchell
  • Genealogy, n. An account of one's descent from a man who did not particularly care to trace his own. -- Ambrose Bierce
  • In the world of the celebrity, the hierarchy of publicity has replaced the hierarchy of descent and even of great wealth. -- C. Wright Mills
  • I would say to you that Americans of Hispanic descent want desperately to give their children the chances they never had. -- Marco Rubio
  • I'm of Nigerian descent, from the Yoruba tribe. Names are very significant in that culture. It basically states your purpose in life. -- Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje
  • After 1980, you never heard reference to space again. Surface, the most convincing evidence of the descent into materialism, became the focus of design. Space disappeared. -- Arthur Erickson
  • It now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one...the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals. -- Mark Twain
  • Deconstructing the concept of race not only conflicts with people's tendency to classify and build family histories according to common descent but also ignores the work of biologists studying non-human species. -- J. Philippe Rushton
  • When we say Afro American, we include everyone in the Western Hemisphere of African descent. South America is America. Central America is America. South America has many people in it of African descent. -- Malcolm X
  • The Descent of Darwin: A Handbook of Doubts about Darwinism, -- Errol White
  • Every worthy act is difficult. Ascent is always difficult. Descent is easy and often slippery. -- Mahatma Gandhi
  • I'm often mistaken for Spanish or Latin descent. -- Rita Ora
  • My life has been one long descent into respectability. -- Mandy Rice-Davies
  • The descent to Hades is the same from every place. -- Anaxagoras
  • Though born in Nova Scotia, I am of almost pure New England descent. -- Simon Newcomb
  • Those who boast of their descent, brag on what they owe to others. -- Seneca the Younger
  • Those who boast of their descent, brag on what they owe to others. -- Seneca the Younger
  • If your descent is from heroic sires, Show in your life a remnant of their fires. -- Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux
  • We as Americans of Latin descent are just as American as anyone else of any other descent. -- Esai Morales
  • The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it. -- William H. Gass
  • My parents were both from extremely different backgrounds. My father's Italian, my mother was of Swedish descent. They're both first-generation Americans. -- Susan Lucci
  • The descent to the infernal regions is easy enough, but to retrace one's steps, and reach the air above, there's the rub. -- Virgil
  • Americanism is a question of principle, of idealism, of character. It is not a matter of birthplace, or creed, or line of descent. -- Theodore Roosevelt
  • I'm of African descent and my sister looks completely black, but I didn't look black. I was the super-nerdy kid who was also willing to fight. -- Junot Diaz
  • The child now shewed her a narrow and rugged descent, made by cutting the red clay and stones, of which the cliffs are here composed, into a sort of rude steps. -- Charlotte Smith
  • For let us not underestimate the Christian: the Christian, false to the point of innocence, is far above the ape-regarding Christians, a well known theory of descent becomes a mere compliment. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
  • There is a descent from God through the world to animals, and an ascent from animals through the world to God. He is the highest point of the scale, pure act and active power, the purest light. -- Giordano Bruno
  • No country in Europe has a larger proportion of men and women of immigrant descent, mainly from the African continent and mainly Muslim: an estimated six to seven million of them, or more than 10% of the population. -- Timothy Garton Ash
  • I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. -- W.S. Gilbert
  • The sluices of the grog-shop are fed from the wine-glasses in the parlor, and there is a lineal descent from the gentleman who hiccoughs at his elegant dinner-table to the sot who makes a bed of the gutter. -- Edwin Hubbel Chapin
  • Many labourers can trace their descent from farmers or well-to-do people, and it is not uncommon to find here and there a man who believes that he is entitled to a large property in Chancery, or elsewhere, as the heir. -- Richard Jefferies
  • When passion has wrecked the body in one life, it is stamped upon the seed atom. In the next descent to rebirth, it is therefore impossible for him to gather sound material with which to build a brain of stable construction. -- Max Heindel
  • The history of American democracy, to say the least, has been checkered. Our nation was founded at a time when people of African descent were held in bondage. After slavery was abolished, they were forced to endure legal discrimination for another 100 years. -- Bernie Sanders
  • Whether we're conscious of it or not, our work and personal lives are made up of daily rituals, including when we eat our meals, how we shower or groom, or how we approach our daily descent into the digital world of email communication. -- Chip Conley
  • 'Breaking Bad' is great at blurring the line between good and evil. It makes you feel compassion for Walter White so you're with him throughout this descent into the darker parts of his psyche. The bad that we're capable of is all circumstantial. -- Jesse Plemons
  • A novel can grant humanity even to those who act inhumanely, and by making men and women of monsters, it can offer not only a ground-level view of a particular conflict, but a descent into the substratum of human nature capable of the incomprehensible. -- Anthony Marra
  • A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians. -- William James
  • I feel that writers think with their noses to the ground, and the dark stuff kind of comes to me more, even though I really am sort of an upbeat guy. It's an honest descent into darkness. And you can't have the joy without the grief - it's why we listen to Mozart's 'Requiem.' -- Andre Dubus
  • Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique. When you're willing to stand up within the group and say, 'It is wrong for Black people to be anti-Semitic,' or 'It is wrong for America to discriminate against persons of African descent and made them slaves and based its wealth upon free labor,' it's crucial to say that. -- Henry Louis Gates
  • Danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity, and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose -- as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to sniveling and giggles. -- Joseph Conrad
  • It's hard to be a minority. People look at you a different way, like you don't belong, and I don't think many people realize just how difficult it is to live as a minority. Where I come from, we learn to tolerate one another. Whether one is of Chinese descent or Malay descent, what matters is we're part of the same country, the same world. -- Andrea Hirata
  • His descent was like nightfall. -- Homer
  • The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned -- William Carlos Williams
  • You've seen my descent, now watch my rising. -- Rumi
  • Facilis decensus averni. The descent into hell is easy. -- Virgil
  • He who boasts of his descent, praises the deed of another. -- Seneca the Younger
  • The descent into the depths always seems to precede the ascent. -- Carl Jung
  • Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself. -- Franz Kafka
  • The descent into Hades is much the same from whatever place we start. -- Anaxagoras
  • The descent is often as much (or more of) a challenge as the climb. -- Steve House
  • Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness. -- Immanuel Kant
  • The descent into matter must be complete before the ascent to spirit can commence. -- Dion Fortune
  • Noble descent and worth, unless united with wealth, are esteemed no more than seaweed. -- Horace
  • High descent and meritorious deeds, unless united to wealth, are as useless as seaweed. -- Horace
  • If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. -- Albert Camus
  • The descent to hell is easy and those who begin by worshipping power, soon worship evil. -- C. S. Lewis
  • Half of San Antonio's population is of Mexican descent; the other half just eats that way. -- Mike Greenberg
  • I love writing for other actors, women of African descent and people who are generally underrepresented. -- Danai Gurira
  • Death was not to be a leap: it was to be a long descent under thickening shadows. -- George Eliot
  • I was born and raised in New York, but my family on both sides is of Italian descent. -- Aida Turturro
  • In many ways the rise of the state was the descent of the world from freedom to slavery -- Marvin Harris
  • I live for books that produce a mood of gathering creepy fascination, a true descent in the Weird. -- Gemma Files
  • Of great interest to students and teachers of immigrant history as well as to those of Polish descent. -- Florian Znaniecki
  • Happy in all that ragged, loose collapse of water, the fountain, its effortless descent and flatteries of spray... -- Richard Wilbur
  • Our descent, then, is the origin of our evil passions!! The devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather. -- Charles Darwin
  • there is no ascent to the heights without prior descent into darkness, no new life without some form of death. -- Karen Armstrong
  • If ancient descent could confer nobility, the lower forms of life would possess it in a greater degree than man. -- John Lancaster Spalding
  • Hope changes everything. It changes winter into summer, darkness into dawn, descent into ascent, barrenness into creativity, agony into joy. -- Daisaku Ikeda
  • A trip to the hospital is always a descent into the macabre. I have never trusted a place with shiny floors. -- Terry Tempest Williams
  • Between the desire And the spasm, Between the potency And the existence, Between the essence And the descent, Falls the Shadow. -- T. S. Eliot
  • I believe the evidence strongly supports common descent. But the root question remains unanswered: What has caused complex systems to form? -- Michael Behe
  • From yon blue heaven above us bent, The grand old gardener and his wife Smile at the claims of long descent. -- Alfred Lord Tennyson
  • ...the worlds represent increasing phases of densification, the involuting descent of spirit into matter, where the way becomes harder and longer... -- Rudolf Steiner
  • Something is very, very wrong with American culture. The signs are everywhere. I think the country is in almost terminal descent. -- Randall Robinson
  • --
  • You are my angel and my damnation; in your presence I reach divine ecstasy and in your absence I descent to hell. -- Isabel Allende
  • I sung of Chaos and Eternal Night, Taught by the heav'nly Muse to venture down The dark descent, and up to reascend... -- John Milton
  • Let no man trust the first false step of guilt; it hangs upon a precipice, whose steep descent in last perdition ends. -- Edward Young
  • I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent. -- Charles Darwin
  • It?s a beautiful descent in a 737, into the Bitterroot Valley, following the Clark Fork River, on a perfect golden autumn day . -- Garrison Keillor
  • As the interned American citizens of Japanese descent learned, the Bill of Rights provided them with little protection when it was needed. -- Glenn Reynolds
  • Story should be a descent -- the feeling that there is an intense gravity to the narrative that draws you down, down, down. -- Chuck Wendig
  • Americans have almost been conditioned to believe that the majority of people who seek to do us harm are those of Muslim descent. -- Bennie Thompson
  • In general, watching children's television is a dark and surreal descent into madness where the characters on the screen talk directly to you. -- John Green
  • A representative form of government rests nor more on political contributions than on those laws which regulate the descent and transmission of property. -- Daniel Webster
  • For what we cannot accomplish, what is denied to love, what we have lost in the anticipation a descent follows, endless and indestructible. -- William Carlos Williams
  • I find the idea of common descent (that all organisms share a common ancestor) fairly convincing, and have no particular reason to doubt it. -- Michael Behe
  • The path of descent is the path of transformation. Darkness, failure, relapse, death, and woundedness are our primary teachers, rather than ideas or doctrines. -- Richard Rohr
  • I am not sure that any sight or sound on earth is as exquisite as the hushed descent of a sky full of snow. -- Parker J. Palmer
  • Who climbs the mountain does not always climb.The winding road slants downward many a time;Yet each descent is higher than the last. -- Ella Wheeler Wilcox
  • I've never understood why the end of a relationship - especially one involving children - has to immediately signal a descent into hatred and toxicity. -- John Niven
  • No one has ever proved that a human being, through his descent from a certain group of people, must of necessity have certain mental characteristics. -- Franz Boas
  • I shudder to think where we people of African descent would be without our allies in the international community. It's been our everything, quite frankly. -- Gerald Horne
  • We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without the means to measure our descent. -- Richard M. Weaver
  • Boys, the first drink is a boon, the second is a gamble, the third is poor judgment, and then the rate of descent gets steep -- Garrison Keillor
  • Anaxagoras said to a man who was grieving because he was dying in a foreign land, "The descent to Hades is the same from every place. -- Diogenes Laertius
  • There is no comparing the brutality and cynicism of today's pop culture with that of forty years ago: from High Noon to Robocop is a long descent. -- Charles Krauthammer
  • It is better to be the builder of our own name than to be indebted by descent for the proudest gifts known to the books of heraldry. -- Hosea Ballou
  • In skydiving, it is the fear response that gradually weakens. During the precipitous descent, the amply tested parachutist can savor the thrill rather than endure the panic. -- Dean Keith Simonton
  • Compromise, while at times morally necessary or at least justifiable, is more often only the first permission for a person (or society) to begin a long downhill descent. -- Dennis Prager
  • I knew how one climbing the mountain of worldly success can slip down into the river below without being conscious of the descent till he is already drowning. -- Diego Rivera
  • Life is so complicated a game that the devices of skill are liable to be defeated at every turn by air-blown chances, incalculable as the descent of thistle-down. -- George Eliot
  • Miracles occur, If you dare to call those spasmodic Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again, The long wait for the angel, For that rare, random descent. -- Sylvia Plath
  • The idea that somehow people of African descent are not part of the same species as whites was accepted by European men of science in the early modern period. -- Manisha Sinha
  • Bolshevism may be Marxian in theory, but it is Hulagoesque in practice. It may be of European descent, but it is Oriental in tradition. Oriental in mood. Oriental in temperament. -- Ameen Rihani
  • Mitochondrial DNA, which is a sort of abridged version of DNA, is passed directly from mother to child, so it's something that can be looked at to trace matrilineal descent. -- Elizabeth Kolbert
  • My dad is from Japanese descent, my mom is from Swedish descent and, through marriages and divorces, a pretty multicultural family - a lot of Spanish speakers in the family. -- Cary Fukunaga
  • All people of African descent, whether they live in North or South America, the Caribbean, or in any part of the world are Africans and belong to the African nation. -- Kwame Nkrumah
  • After the departure of the land parties, I embarked with six men on thursday, the 21st april, on board my newly made boat and began the descent of the river. -- William Henry Ashley
  • His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. -- James Joyce
  • To rise above treeline is to go above thought, and after, the descent back into bird song, bog orchids, willows, and firs is to sink into the preliterate parts of ourselves. -- Gretel Ehrlich
  • Christ is at once the spotless descent of God into men and the sinless ascent of man into God, and the Holy Spirit is the Agent by whom this is accomplished. -- John G. Lake
  • If the present generation, or any other, are disposed to be slaves, it does not lessen the right of the succeeding generation to be free: wrongs cannot have a legal descent. -- Thomas Paine
  • --
  • Deconstructing the concept of race not only conflicts with people's tendency to classify and build family histories according to common descent but also ignores the work of biologists studying non-human species." -- J. Philippe Rushton
  • There are, above all, times in which the human reality, always mobile, accelerates, and bursts into vertiginous speeds. Our time is such a one, for it is made of descent and fall. -- Jose Ortega y Gasset
  • I have made a long enough descent into the void to speak with certainty. There is nothing but beauty--and beauty has only one perfect expression, Poetry. All the rest is a lie. -- Stephane Mallarme
  • I care not whether the soldiers are of Milesian, Teutonic, African or Angelo-Saxon descent. I despise the principle that make a difference between them in the hour of battle and of death. -- Thaddeus Stevens
  • And sure enough, in seeking to become superhuman this foolhardy young man renders himself inhuman. The heart that he has locked away slowly shrivels and grows hair, symbolising his own descent to beasthood. -- J. K. Rowling
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