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David Starr Jordan Quotes
1851–1931 United States
David Starr Jordan, Ph.D., LL.D. (January 19, 1851 – September 19, 1931) was a leading ichthyologist (the study of fish), educator and peace activist. He was president of Indiana University (Bloomington) and Stanford University.
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15 quotes
The world stands aside to let anyone pass who knows where he is going.
Wisdom is knowing what to do next. Virtue is doing it.
Poverty, dirt, and crime are the products of those, in general, who are not good material.
There is no real excellence in all this world which can be separated from right living.
Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for.
The second [eugenic goal] is the limitation by public authority of the marriage of the defective, the insane, and the criminal.
’’’The blood of a nation determines its history.’’’
Indiscriminate charity has been a fruitful cause of the survival of the unfit. To kill the strong and feed the weak is to provide for a progeny of weakness.
The dangers of foreign immigration lie in the overflow to our shores of hereditary unfitness. The causes that lead to degeneration have ling been at work among the poor of Europe.
What scientific eugenics does aim for is for the elimination, by restriction, of hopeless hereditary feeble-mindedness and of defects which must condemn one’s posterity to ineffective and joyless lives.
The crétin of Aosta has been developed as a new type of man. In fair weather the roads about are lined with these awful paupers - human beings with less intelligence than the goose and less decency than the pig.
We have also the pedigrees of the dissolute, the feeble-minded, the idle, the defective. We find in these that evil and weakness rarely originate de novo, but that they are handed down as a baneful legacy from generation to generation.
The seeds of Rome's fall lay not in race nor in form of government, nor in wealth nor in senility, but in the influences by which the best men were cut off from parenthood, leaving its own weaker strains and strains of lower races to be fathers of coming generations.
The strong races were born of hard times, they have fought for all they have had, and the strength of those they have conquered has entered into their wills. They have been selected by competition and sifted by the elements. They have risen through struggle and they have gained through mutual help, and by the power of the human will have made the earth their own.
If Richard Roe by chance is defective, unable by heredity to rise to the level of helpfulness and happiness, it is not a wholesome act to help him to the responsibilities of parenthood. It is a wise charity to make him as comfortable as may be with the assurance that he shall be the last of his line.
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