HEREDITY • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Heredity

"Heredity" Quotes from Famous Books

... interesting to watch heredity at play. Given the inclination to write, what kind of a first book should we get from the son of one of the most cultured and sensitive classical scholars and translators of this or any day and from the grandson ...

— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 1, 1920 • Various

... a guide to conduct. He thought that, if each human being were free to act as he chose, he would be sure to act for the best; for, according to him, instincts do not exist. He makes no allowance for the influence of the past in forming the present, ignoring the laws of heredity. A man's character is formed by the nature of his surroundings. Virtue and vice are the result not of innate tendencies, but of external circumstances. When these are perfected, evil will necessarily disappear from the world. He had so successfully subordinated his own emotions, that in his philosophical ...

— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... raise the mass above its own level, the more convinced I am that my nurse was right. Progress can do nothing but make the most of us all as we are, and that most would clearly not be enough even if those who are already raised out of the lowest abysses would allow the others a chance. The bubble of Heredity has been pricked: the certainty that acquirements are negligible as elements in practical heredity has demolished the hopes of the educationists as well as the terrors of the degeneracy mongers; and we know now that there is no hereditary "governing ...

— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw

... men of twenty-four can go very deeply into questions of heredity. Of what follows here much was not known to Paul. Much that he did know he would have interpreted differently. The old well at Stone Ridge, for instance, had no place in his recital; and yet out of it sprang the history of his shorn generation. Had Paul's mother grown up in a houseful of brothers ...

— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote

... French life and applied it in studying American life, as one uses certain algebraic formulae to solve certain problems. It is perhaps the only truthful literary method of dealing with that part of society which environment and heredity hedge about like the walls of a prison. It is true that Mr. Norris now and then allows his "method" to become too prominent, that his restraint savors of constraint, yet he has written a true story of the people, courageous, dramatic, full of matter and ...

— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather

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