When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary. - Thomas Paine
It is impossible to make wisdom hereditary.
Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices, but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence and fulfills the duty to express the results of his thought in clear form. - Albert Einstein
When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember, that virtue is not hereditary. - Thomas Paine
A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism. - Carl Sagan
History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what do do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from. - Jill Lepore
A hereditary monarch is as absurd a position as a hereditary doctor or mathematician. - Thomas Paine
Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence. - Albert Einstein
Insanity is hereditary; you get it from your children. - Sam Levenson
Celibacy is not hereditary.
..nor did he pause to reflect that hereditary aristocracies have always been short lived where as adoptive organizations such as the Catholic Church sometimes lasted for hundreds or thousands of years. - George Orwell