“No one alive today has a single ancestor in his or her past who died in infancy. We are the champions, my friend!”

“His wife...always dressed in mourning for the children who died in infancy and squeezed breathless by the pressure of her corset, her religion, and the husband fate had dealt her”

“Every living thing is, from the cosmic perspective, incredibly lucky simply to be alive. Most, 90 percent and more, of all the organisms that have ever lived have died without viable offspring, but not a single one of your ancestors, going back to the dawn of life on Earth, suffered that normal misfortune. You spring from an unbroken line of winners going back millions of generations, and those winners were, in every generation, the luckiest of the lucky, one out of a thousand or even a million. So however unlucky you may be on some occasion today, your presence on the planet testifies to the role luck has played in your past.”

“No one can be free who has a thousand ancestors.”

“There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.”

“Because I have forgiven my past, and God has forgiven my past, no person on earth can make me denounce my past. It's what made me who I am today.”