Sedulia's Quotations

Steve Harvey on men meeting women

We men are very simple people: if we like what we see, we're coming over there. If we don't want anything from you, we're not coming over there.

... He doesn't care anything about your personality or what you do for a living; your friends mean nothing to him, and whether you know Jesus is irrelevant. He just wants to know if he might be able to sleep with you, and he's talking to you to determine exactly how much he has to invest to get what he wants.

—Steve Harvey (1957-) in Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man

African-Americans' DNA: 13 percent European on average

  

The largest genetic study of African populations reveals a greater diversity among the continent's cultural groups than previously known....the new research shows that "no single African population is representative of the diversity of the continent," says study coauthor Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Tishkoff and her colleagues analyzed particular DNA sequences... from more than 3000 people from 121 different populations scattered throughout Africa....

To reach remote groups, such as the Pygmies of Cameroon and the hunter-gatherers of Tanzania, researchers drove off-road and set up makeshift labs with equipment powered by their car battery.

"This is by far the most in-depth analysis in terms of populations analyzed," comments evolutionary geneticist Mark Stoneking of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

..."We knew that African populations were diverse in culture, art, religious ideas," says Roy King of Stanford University School of Medicine. "Now we see that genetic diversity goes along these same lines"....

It turns out that the San bushmen of southern Africa have the most distinct, and therefore oldest, genetic sequences, the team reports....

Genetic information from African-Americans living in three U.S. cities and an additional state was also collected and analyzed. On average, African-Americans inherited 71 percent of their DNA from western Africa, 8 percent from other locations in Africa and 13 percent from Europe, the team says. Most of the African-Americans in the study had mixed ancestry from different regions of western Africa, which made tracing ancestry to particular ethnic groups difficult....

The researchers are quick to point out that the data set is incomplete. "We analyzed 121 populations out of a possible 2000," Tishkoff says....

    --Science News, article by Solmaz Barazesh, 23 May 2009

Condoleezza Rice: Anything U.S. President does is automatically legal

The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations, under the Convention Against Torture. And so, by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.

               --Condoleezza Rice (1954- ) to Stanford students in April, 2009, as seen on Cenk Uygur's video

Will.i.am: If countries were people, Italy would be dead

If countries were people, England and France would be old men. Italy would be dead.

     --Will.i.am (William J. Adams) (1975- ) in an interview with Dana White, Oprah magazine, May 2009

Jefferson on American Indians and on slavery, the "blot on our moral history"

I rejoice also in your advocation of the Indian rights and concur in all your sentiments in their favor. I once had hopes that the Southern tribes were nearly ripe for incorporation with us. The facility with which the cotton plants enables them to clothe themselves renders their civilization easier than that of the Northern tribes, who are obliged to resort to the beasts of the forest for covering; but my hopes in the south are damped by the transactions of the late war which in destroying many of them have produced in the rest so implacable a hatred of us as to revolt them against all counsels coming from us. The happy numbers in which you have so strongly and so feelingly expressed their wrongs will ensure their being read, and felt by breasts which humble prose can rarely touch, reading they will reflect, and feel the duties we owe to that race of men. I wish that was the only blot in our moral history, and that no other race had higher charges to bring against us. I am not apt to despair; yet I see not how we are to disengage ourselves from that deplorable entanglement, we have the wolf by the ears and feel the danger of either holding or letting him loose. I shall not live to see it but those who come after us will be wiser than we are, for light is spreading and man improving. To that advancement I look, and to the dispensations of an all-wise and all-powerful providence to devise the means of effecting what is right.

--From a letter by Thomas Jefferson to Mrs. Sigourney, 18 July 1824

The Obama wine cellar

[Barack Obama's] $1.6 million house in the city's South Side has four fireplaces and a 1,000-bottle wine cellar.

--"The Harvard 100: The Most Influential Alumni" in 02138, a magazine about Harvard

Nikki Giovanni: You must not be "a man of your time."

You can't be "a man of your time."

   --Nikki Giovanni (1943-), poet, on why people must resist the evils of their own era. She was discussing the wife of a 1960s Klansman who had recently said that her husband "was a man of his time" and wouldn't have behaved that way nowadays.

Mo'Nique Imes on television ratings in Black and White America

When I first started out with "The Parkers" and it was No. 1, I was in Philly and this woman says, "It's great that you're No. 1 in Black America, but you're No. 160-something in White America." I said, "Well, before I answer your question, have you asked the cast of 'Friends' how it feels to be No. 200 in Black America?" The interview was then over.

  --Mo'Nique Imes (1967-) interviewed by Choire Sicha in the Los Angeles Times, 29 April 2007.

Colman Mac Beognae: What is best for the mind? Breadth and humility

What is best for the mind? Breadth and humility, for every good thing finds room in a broad, humble mind. What is worst for the mind? Narrowness and closedness, and constrictedness, for nothing good finds room in a narrow, closed, restricted mind.

        --Colman Mac Beognae (died 611), The Alphabet of Piety.