David Roberts Quotes

It only takes twenty generations of selective breeding to create large differences or appearance and behavior in other mammals.

The purpose of love, sex, and marriage is the production and raising of children. But look about you: Most people have no business having children. They are unqualified, either genetically or culturally or both, to reproduce such sorry specimens as themselves. Of all our privileges, the license to breed is the one most grossly abused.

Life is about survival of the fittest, and Jersey is producing the master race.

Apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.

I was working with these very long-chain ... extended-chain polymers, where you had a lot of benzene rings in them. ... Transforming a polymer solution from a liquid to a fiber requires a process called spinning. ... We spun it and it spun beautifully. It [Kevlar] was very strong and very stiff-unlike anything we had made before. I knew that I had made a discovery. I didn't shout "Eureka!" but I was very excited, as was the whole laboratory excited, and management was excited, because we were looking for something new. Something different. And this was it.

No animal ever has an ugly body until it is domesticated. It is the same with the human body.

Artificial selection turned the wolf into the shepherd, and the wild grasses into wheat and corn. In fact, almost every plant and animal that we eat today was bred from a wild, less edible ancestor. If artificial selection can work such profound changes in only ten or fifteen thousand years, what can natural selection do operating over billions of years? The answer is all the beauty and diversity of life.

The local shepherd, I vividly remember his old Barbour jacket, with a hipflask in the pocket. It just feels very familiar - like part of my childhood. The smell of the wax. Whenever I put one on now, it just feels comforting.

The Eugenic Society . . . is perpetually bewailing the fact that wage-earners breed faster than middle-class people.

Like the advocates of Birth Control, the eugenists, for instance, are seeking to assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit. Both are seeking a single end but they lay emphasis upon different methods.

Among the Spartans all newly born children were subject to a careful examination or selection. All those that were weak, sickly, or affected with any bodily infirmity, were killed. Only the perfectly healthy and strong children were allowed to live, and they alone afterwards propagated the race.

In a few generations you can breed a racehorse. The recipe for making a man like Delacroix is less well known.

Hear and attend and listen; for this is what befell and be-happened and became and was, O my Best Beloved, when the Tame animals were wild. The dog was wild, and the Horse was wild, and the Cow was wild, and the Sheep was wild, and the Pig was wild -as wild as wild could be - and they walked in the Wet Wild Woods by their wild lones. But the wildest of all the wild animals was the Cat. He walked by himself and all places were alike to him

There are no wild, seedless watermelons. There's no wild cows... You list all the fruit, and all the vegetables, and ask yourself, is there a wild counterpart to this? If there is, it's not as large, it's not as sweet, it's not as juicy, and it has way more seeds in it. We have systematically genetically modified all the foods, the vegetables and animals that we have eaten ever since we cultivated them. It's called artificial selection.

I think it's pretty ridiculous to sit back and think that we've changed the horse so much, without realizing that they have changed us an awful lot too.

I just don't believe people can tame animals.

If I choose to write about sheep, it's just because I happened to write about sheep. There is no deep significance.

Chloroform unfit children. Show them the same mercy that is shown beasts that are no longer fit to live.

A piece of cloth that is called "linen" has more validity than calling you and me "black" or "negro." "Cotton" has more validity as cotton than yours and my being "black."

Natural selection must be replaced by eugenical artificial selection. This idea constitutes the sound core of eugenics, the applied science of human betterment.

Some have asked if the stock of men could not be improved,--if they could not be bred as cattle. Let Love be purified, and all therest will follow. A pure love is thus, indeed, the panacea for all the ills of the world.

You have three people in the White House that are in love with eugenics or whatever it is you would call it today.

A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.