Marcus Tullius Cicero Quotes
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.
Cicero, Marcus Tullius. Cicero: The Orations, Volume II. Translated by C. D. Yonge, George Bell & Sons, 1891, p. 211.
See Lenin for a similar view from a communist perspective.
Ingersoll was considered to be the greatest orator and political thinker of his day, but his overt atheistic views curtailed his elected political career.
There were some people at the time who believed that by means of effort and following moral precepts there would be an equality of achievement. There were also many who began to observe that much of the differences between individuals were are result of environment—opportunity for education, socialization and other factors. Science is still trying to determine the relative causal contributions to individual differences of genetics and environment.
This quotation is important for two reasons. First, it appears to be the first use of the nature-nurture words to discuss this concept. Second, this “conclusion” started one of the longest running scientific debates in biology—nurture vs nature.
She was one of Francis Galton’s collaborators in his laboratory. This particular quotation if true challenges some of the basic aspects of democracy itself. However, it was a large part of the basis for the Eugenics movement, and is still argued by some today.
He was the intellectual antithesis of Francis Galton and the Eugenicists in the Nature vs Nurture debates.
Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman statesman, orator, lawyer and philosopher, who served as consul in the year 63 BC. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the Roman equestrian order, and is considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists.
