31 Quotes Tagged: heritage

"And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds "joy luck" is not a word, it does not exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation."

But let us not forget that human love and compassion are equally deeply rooted in our primate heritage, and in this sphere too our sensibilities are of a higher order of magnitude than those of chimpanzees.

"The media "could not be policed from without and had to be policed from within.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind.

We're a violent people, Cal. Does it seem strange to you that I include myself? Maybe it's true, that we are all descendants of the restless, the nervous, the criminals, the arguers, and brawlers. But also the brave, and independent, and generous. If our ancestors hadn't been that, they would've stayed in their home plots in the other world and starved over the squeezed-out soil.

Many races as well as cultural influences of men of all kinds have mixed into any man. To select, for approbation the peculiar elements that come from some supposedly Jewish heredity is to open the door to all kinds of nonsense on racial theory.

I'm half-Irish, half-Dutch, and I was born in Belgium. If I was a dog, I'd be in a hell of a mess!

Bless all the women of this world who nurture our heritage while too many man rush off to kill for ideals that might now be deeply and personally held, but will often be viewed as repugnant by later generations.

The myth is not my own; I have it from my mother.

I will not delay the reader with lengthy quotations from the very many Taiwanese flood myths that were collected from amongst the indigenous population, primarily by Japanese scholars, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Typically they tell a story of a warning from the gods, the sound of thunder in the sky, terrifying earthquakes, the pouring down of a wall of water which engulfs mankind, and the survival of a remnant who had either fled to mountain tops or who floated to safety on some sort of improvised vessel.
To provide just one example (from the Ami tribe of central Taiwan), we hear how the four gods of the sea conspired with two gods of the land, Kabitt and Aka, to destroy mankind. The gods of the sea warned Kabitt and Aka: 'In five days when the round moon appears, the sea will make a booming sound: then escape to a mountain where there are stars.' Kabitt and Aka heeded the warning immediately and fled to the mountain and 'when they reached the summit, the sea suddenly began to make the sound and rose higher and higher'. All the lowland settlements were inundated but two children, Sura and Nakao, were not drowned: 'For when the flood overtook them, they embarked in a wooden mortar, which chanced to be lying in the yard of their house, and in that frail vessel they floated safely to the Ragasan mountain.'
So here, handed down since time immemorial by Taiwanese headhunters, we have the essence of the story of Noah's Ark, which is also the story of Manu and the story of Zisudra and (with astonishingly minor variations) the story of all the deluge escapees and survivors in all the world. At some point a real investigation should be mounted into why it is that furious tribes of archaeologists, ethnologists and anthropologists continue to describe the similarities amongst these myths of earth-destroying floods as coincidental, rooted in exaggeration, etc., and thus irrelevant as historical testimony. This is contrary to reason when we know that over a

So what was going on in Malta that led to all this? Why did the first megalithic temple-builders in the world choose to make things so difficult for themselves? Why didn't they start with small megaliths (if that is not too serious a contradiction in terms)? Why didn't they start simple? Why did they plunge straight into the very complicated stuff, like Gigantija and the Hypogeum? And, having plunged, how did they manage to produce such magnificent results? Was it beginner's luck? Or were their achievements as humanity's pioneering architects the product of some sort of heritage?
Beginner's luck is possible, but having studied the earliest temples, and their level of perfection, archaeologists agree that heritage is the right answer. The only problem is what heritage? And where is it to be looked for? Since it is the received wisdom that no human beings lived on Malta before 5200 BC, and since this is a 'fact' that is at present unquestioned anywhere within conventional scholarship, archaeologists from roughly the mid-twentieth century onwards have simply seen no reason to explore the possibility that the heritage of the Maltese temples might be older than 5200 BC. To do so would be the research equivalent of an oxymoron — like breeding dodos, trying to conduct an interview with William Shakespeare or seeking evidence that the earth is flat — and would invite the ridicule of one's peers.

In 1512, in handwritten notes on an enigmatic map that he had prepared showing the newly discovered Americas, the Turkish Admiral Piri Reis offered an intriguing answer to all these questions — at any rate for the particular case of Christopher Colombus, the most recent and most renowned of the ancient Atlantic dreamers. Piri's note, one of many on the same map, is written over the interior of Brazil:
'Apparently a Genoese infidel, by the name of Columbus was the one who discovered these parts. This is how it happened: a book came into the hands of this Colombus from which he found out that the Western Sea [i.e. the Atlantic] has an end, in other words that there is a coast and islands on its western side with many kinds of ores and gems. Having read this book through, he recounted all these things to the Genoese elders and said, 'Come, give me two ships, and I shall go and find these places.' They said, 'Foolish man, is there an end to the Western Sea? It is filled with the mists of darkness.

Old men want to feel that the experience which has come with their years is valuable, that their advice is valuable, that they possess a sagacity that could be obtained only through experience — a sagacity that could be of use to young men if only young men would ask.

If the normal portolano is indeed derived from the lost atlas of Marinus of Tyre, then it follows that other high-quality maps of regions much further afield than the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and indeed a world map, might also have been preserved by the Arabs — for we know from Ptolemy's testimony that other Marinus maps, including a world map, did once exist. It will therefore do no harm to keep an open mind to the possibility that the portolan world maps that began to appear during the century after the Carta Pisane, might also have been influenced by earlier 'Tyrian sea-fish' maps of Phoenician origin. Christopher Columbus, whose passionate belief in lands across the Atlantic lead to his 'discovery' of the New World, seems to hint at a Phoenician connection when he describes one of the inspirations for his journey:
'Aristotle in his book On Marvellous Things reports a story that some Carthaginian merchants sailed over the Ocean Sea to a very fertile island ... this island some Portuguese showed me on their charts under the name Antilia.'
Antilia first appears on a portolan chart of 1424. It is a mysterious presence there, a riddle.

Traditions, with all their folksy redolences, are relatively safe matters for scholars to speculate about. Maps and nautical charts on the other hand — especially accurate, sophisticated maps of the kind used by Guzarate to chart Vasco da Gama's course from Malindi to Calicut in 1498 — are quite another matter. If maps have indeed come down to us containing recognizable representations of Ice Age topography — as arguably may be the case with the depictions of India and of the long-submerged Sundaland peninsula by Cantino and Reinal and with the depiction of the 'Golden Chersonese' by Ptolemy — then prehistory cannot be as it has hitherto been presented to us.
If they are what they seem, such maps mean a lost civilization. Nothing more. Nothing less.