HEREDITY

Related Subjects: Ancestry, Blood, Breeding, Character, Family, Posterity

1. The present policies of the German government are based on the assumption that an "Aryan" has certain biologically determined qualities that are entirely foreign to every "Non-Aryan." All members of each race, it is claimed, have certain unescapable hereditary characteristics which determine their mental life and their social behavior. These beliefs are based on a complete misunderstanding of what constitutes a race and of the way in which we arrive at the concept of a racial type.—FRANZ BOAS, Aryans & Non-Aryans
   

2. That unity of race, which is the foundation of the policies of the German government, does not exist. A race consists of individuals diverse in bodily build; and heredity is a matter that is important in the study of the forms of the offspring, but there is no such thing as racial heredity even in relatively pure groups in regard to those traits that occur in many different forms in that group.—FRANZ BOAS, Aryans & Non-Aryans
   

3. How shall a man escape from his ancestors, or draw off from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father's or his mother's life?—EMERSON, Conduct of Life
   

4. A hundred little things make likenesses
   In brethen born, and shows the father's blood.—EURIPIDES, Electra
   

5. What we have inherited from our fathers and mothers is not all that "walks" in us. There are all sorts of dead ideas and lifeless old beliefs. They have no tangibility but they haunt us all the same and we cannot get rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper I seem to see Ghosts gliding between the lines. Ghosts must be all over the country, as thick as the sands of the sea.—IBSEN, Ghosts

6. The proper time to influence the character of a child is about a hundred years before he is born.—DEAN INGE
   

7. There are some hereditary strokes of character by which a family may be as clearly distinguished as by the blackest features of the human face.—JUNIUS
   

8. The error of the eugenists lies in the assumption that a physically healthy man is the best fitted to survive. . . . Imagine estimating philosophers by their chest expansions, their blood pressures, their Wassermann reactions.—H. L. MENCKEN
   

9. It will not out of the flesh that is bred in the bone.—Proverb
   

10. Bull Jove, sir, had an amiable low;
    And some such strange bull leap'd your father's cow,
    And got a calf in that same noble feat
    Much like to you, for you have just his bleat.—SHAKESPEARE, Much Ado About Nothing