These heredity quotes will inspire you. Heredity, the sum of all biological processes by which particular characteristics are transmitted from parents to their offspring or the passing on of physical or mental characteristics genetically from one generation to another.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging heredity quotes, heredity sayings, and heredity proverbs.
Best Heredity Quotes
- “Increased knowledge of heredity means increased power of control over the living thing, and as we come to understand more and more the architecture of the plant or animal we realize what can and what cannot be done towards modification or improvement.” ~ Reginald Punnett
- “Good heredity and environment are necessary. You cannot compare the child of a savage with the child of a civilized person.” ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti , Heredity quotes and environment
- “Everyone is the heir to all that has gone before; his structure and emotional life is fixed, and no two children of nature have the same heredity. I believe everyone should and must live out what is in him. So no two lives can be the same.” ~ Clarence Darrow
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“The precise form of an individual’s activity is determined, of course, by the equipment with which he came into the world. In other words, it is determined by his heredity.” ~ Henry Louis Gates
- “I believe a unique core self is born into every human being; the result of millennia of environment and heredity combined in an unpredictable way that could never happen before or again.” ~ Gloria Steinem
- “Heredity is a splendid phenomenon that relieves us of responsibility for our shortcomings.” ~ Doug Larson
- “For better or worse, you must play your own little instrument in the orchestra of life.” ~ Dale Carnegie
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“Life consists not simply in what heredity and environment do to us, but in what we make out of what they do to us” ~ Harry Emerson Fosdick
- “All illnesses have some heredity contribution. It’s been said that genetics loads the gun and environment pulls the trigger.” ~ Francis Collins
- “Everyone has it within his power to say, this I am today, that I shall be tomorrow.” ~ Louis L’Amour
- “Our character is not so much the product of race and heredity as of those circumstances by which nature forms our habits, by which we are nurtured and live.” ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero
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“All good qualities in a child are the result of environment, while all the bad ones are the result of poor heredity on the side of the other parent” ~ Elinor Smith
- “Heredity proposes and development disposes.” ~ Peter Medawar
- “I may finally call attention to the probability that the association of paternal and maternal chromosomes in pairs and their subsequent separation during the reducing division as indicated above may constitute the physical basis of the Mendelian law of heredity.” ~ Walter Sutton
- “I am the beneficiary of a lucky break in the genetic sweepstakes.” ~ Isaac Asimov
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“The purpose of feminism is to free the uniqueness of the individual and to understand that inside each of us is a unique human being who is a combination of heredity and environment.” ~ Gloria Steinem
- “From the point of view of the pure morphologist the recapitulation theory is an instrument of research enabling him to reconstruct probable lines of descent; from the standpoint of the student of development and heredity the fact of recapitulation is a difficult problem whose solution would perhaps give the key to a true understanding of the real nature of heredity.” ~ E.S. Russell
- “We know from our clinical experience in the practice of medicine that in diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment, the individual and his background of heredity are just as important, if not more so, as the disease itself.” ~ Paul Dudley White
- “Heredity is nothing but stored environment.” ~ Luther Burbank
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“Heredity provides for the modification of its own machinery.” ~ James Mark Baldwin
- “Freedom was conditioned by man’s physical body, heredity, and environment.” ~ Kenneth Scott Latourette
- “When I want a peerage, I shall buy one like an honest man.” ~ Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe
- “Both of these branches of evolutionary science, are, in my opinion, in the closest causal connection; this arises from the reciprocal action of the laws of heredity and adaptation.” ~ Ernst Haeckel
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“Of course, I also attribute some of my hearing loss to being in the infantry in World War II. It’s probably a combination of heredity and noise exposure.” ~ George Kennedy
- “Training- training is everything; training is all there is to a person. We speak of nature; it is folly; there is no such thing as nature; what we call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training. We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own; they are transmitted to us, trained into us.” ~ Mark Twain
- “The man of the future may, and even must, do things impossible in the past and acquire new motor variations not given by heredity.” ~ G. Stanley Hall
- “We do not know, in most cases, how far social failure and success are due to heredity, and how far to environment. But environment is the easier of the two to improve.” ~ John B. S. Haldane
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“Heredity is what sets the parents of a teenager wondering about each other.” ~ Laurence J. Peter
- “Acceptance of one’s life has nothing to do with resignation; it does not mean running away from the struggle. On the contrary, it means accepting it as it comes, with all the handicaps of heredity, of suffering, of psychological complexes and injustices.” ~ Paul Tournier
- “We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party.” ~ Lewis Thomas
- “This missing science of heredity, this unworked mine of knowledge on the borderland of biology and anthropology, which for all practical purposes is as unworked now as it was in the days of Plato, is, in simple truth, ten times more important to humanity than all the chemistry and physics, all the technical and indsutrial science that ever has been or ever will be discovered.” ~ George Herbert
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“The whelp of a wolf must prove a wolf at last, notwithstanding he may be brought up by a man.” ~ Saadi
- “If a given scientist had not made a given discovery, someone else would have done so a little later. Johann Mendel dies unknown after having discovered the laws of heredity: thirty-five years later, three men rediscover them. But the book that is not written will never be written. The premature death of a great scientist delays humanity; that of a great writer deprives it.” ~ Jean Rostand
- “Heredity is to-day the central problem of biology. This problem may be approached from many sides – that of the breeder, the experimenter, the statistician, the physiologist, the embryologist, the cytologist – but the mechanism of heredity can be studied best by the investigation of the germ cells and their development.” ~ Edwin Conklin
- “That the fundamental aspects of heredity should have turned out to be so extraordinarily simple supports us in the hope that nature may, after all, be entirely approachable. Her much-advertised inscrutability has once more been found to be an illusion due to our ignorance. This is encouraging, for, if the world in which we live were as complicated as some of our friends would have us believe we might well despair that biology could ever become an exact science.” ~ Thomas Hunt Morgan
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“The philosophical implication of race-thinking is that by offering us the mystery of heredity as an explanation, it diverts our attention from the social and intellectual factors that make up personality.” ~ Jacques Barzun
- “The advances of biology during the past 20 years have been breathtaking, particularly in cracking the mystery of heredity. Nevertheless, the greatest and most difficult problems still lie ahead. The discoveries of the 1970’s about the chemical roots of memory in nerve cells or the basis of learning, about the complex behavior of man and animals, the nature of growth, development, disease and aging will be at least as fundamental and spectacular as those of the recent past.” ~ H. Bentley Glass
- “Religion shows a pattern of heredity which I think is similar to genetic heredity. … There are hundreds of different religious sects, and every religious person is loyal to just one of these. … The overwhelming majority just happen to choose the one their parents belonged to. Not the sect that has the best evidence in its favour, the best miracles, the best moral code, the best cathedral, the best stained-glass, the best music when it comes to choosing from the smorgasbord of available religions, their potential virtues seem to count for nothing compared to the matter of heredity.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “All Congresses and Parliaments have a kindly feeling for idiots, and a compassion for them, on account of personal experience and heredity.” ~ Mark Twain
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“I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence.” ~ Sylvia Plath
- “Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.” ~ Van Wyck Brooks
- “People do not spring forth out of the blue, fully formed – they become themselves slowly, day by day, starting from babyhood. They are the result of both environment and heredity, and your fictional characters, in order to be believable, must be also.” ~ Lois Duncan
- “Tobacco, UV rays, viruses, heredity, and age are the main causes of cancer.” ~ Harold E. Varmus
- “The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.” ~ William Faulkner
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“Characteristics cling to families.” ~ Francis Galton
- “Neither heredity nor environment determine character. But whether we give in to or overcome the negative messages we are exposed to as we wend our way through life is often determined by whether our parents, teachers, mentors and friends exposed us to good examples and morally inspiring ideas.” ~ Michael Josephson
- “You are not barred from attaining greatness by heredity. No matter who or what your ancestors may have been or how unlearned or lowly their station, the upward way is open for you. There is no such thing as inheriting a fixed mental position; no matter how small the mental capital we receive from our parents, it may be increased; no man is incapable of growth.” ~ Wallace D. Wattles
- “I no longer believe the conservative message that children are naturally selfish and destructive creatures who need civilizing by hierarchies or painful controls. On the contrary, I believe that hierarchy and painful controls create destructive people. And I no longer believe the liberal message that children are blank slates on which society can write anything. On the contrary, I believe a unique core self is born into every human being; the result of millennia of environment and heredity combined in an unpredictable way that could never happen before or again.” ~ Gloria Steinem
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“All organisms vary, and it’s just folk knowledge. You just have to look around a room of people, and everybody knows that it’s true. Darwin didn’t know the mechanism of heredity, but you don’t have to. You just need to know the fact of it.” ~ Stephen Jay Gould
- “For the fundamental fact of human psychology is that society, instead of remaining almost entirely inside the individual organism as in the case of animals prompted by their instincts, becomes crystallized almost entirely outside the individuals. In other words, social rules, as Durkheim has so powerfully shown, whether they be linguistic, moral, religious, or legal, etc., cannot be constituted, transmitted or preserved by means of an internal biological heredity, but only through the external pressure exercised by individuals upon each other.” ~ Jean Piaget
- “Increasingly, our leaders must deal with dangers that threaten the entire world, where an understanding of those dangers and the possible solutions depends on a good grasp of science. The ozone layer, the greenhouse effect, acid rain, questions of diet and heredity. All require scientific literacy. Can Americans choose the proper leaders and support the proper programs if they themselves are scientifically illiterate? The whole premise of democracy is that it is safe to leave important questions to the court of public opinion – but is it safe to leave them to the court of public ignorance?” ~ Isaac Asimov
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“Whereas, to borrow an illustration from mathematics, life was formerly an equation of, say, 100 unknown quantities, it is now one of 99 only, inasmuch as memory and heredity have been shown to be one and the same thing.” ~ Samuel Butler
- “Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the a.non.y.muse roller that passed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life’s foolscap.” ~ Vladimir Nabokov
- “I shall borrow two words used for a slightly different purpose by the great demographer Alfred Lotka to distinguish between the two systems of heredity enjoyed by man: endosomatic or internal heredity for the ordinary or genetical heredity we have in common with animals; and exosomatic or external heredity for the non-genetic heredity that is peculiarly our own – the heredity that is mediated through tradition, by which I mean the transfer of information through non-genetic channels from one generation to the next.” ~ Peter Medawar
- “I established the opposite view, that this history of the embryo (ontogeny) must be completed by a second, equally valuable, and closely connected branch of thought – the history of race (phylogeny). Both of these branches of evolutionary science, are, in my opinion, in the closest causal connection; this arises from the reciprocal action of the laws of heredity and adaptation… ‘ontogenesis is a brief and rapid recapitulation of phylogenesis, determined by the physiological functions of heredity (generation) and adaptation (maintenance).” ~ Ernst Haeckel
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“For Scotland has a double dose of the poison called heredity; the sense of blood in the aristocrat, the sense of doom in the Calvinist.” ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton
- “The historic idea that the devil tempts men had this remarkable effect, it produced the man of iron who fought; the modern idea of blaming his heredity or his circumstances produces the man who gives in at once.” ~ Oswald Chambers
- “I realize that it is as one ages and loses one’s natural force that one is at the mercy of heredity. The young are themselves: the aging, their parents’ children.” ~ Sylvia Townsend Warner
- “Many writers claim that nearly all crime is caused by economic conditions, or in other words that poverty is practically the whole cause of crime. Endless statistics have been gathered on this subject which seem to show conclusively that property crimes are largely the result of the unequal distribution of wealth. But crime of any class cannot be safely ascribed to a single cause. Life is too complex, heredity is too variant and imperfect, too many separate things contribute to human behavior, to make it possible to trace all actions to a single cause.” ~ Clarence Darrow
- “Recently, results of the Human Genome Project have shattered one of Science’s fundamental core beliefs, the concept of genetic determinism. We have been led to believe that our genes determine the character of our lives, yet new research surprisingly reveals that it is the character of our lives that controls our genes. Rather than being victims of our heredity, we are actually masters of our genome.” ~ Bruce H. Lipton
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“To defy heredity is to defy billions of years, to defy the first cell” ~ Emile M. Cioran
- “When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock. To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not as a hypothesis that might be incorrect but as a thought it is immoral to think.” ~ Steven Pinker
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“Heredity: the traits that a disobedient child gets from the other parent.” ~ Luther Burbank
- “Cell genetics led us to investigate cell mechanics. Cell mechanics now compels us to infer the structures underlying it. In seeking the mechanism of heredity and variation we are thus discovering the molecular basis of growth and reproduction. The theory of the cell revealed the unity of living processes; the study of the cell is beginning to reveal their physical foundations.” ~ C. D. Darlington
- “…one doubts existence of free will [because] every action determined by heredity, constitution, example of others or teaching of others.” “This view should teach one profound humility, one deserves no credit for anything…nor ought one to blame others.” ~ Charles Darwin
