A human life is nothing in itself; it is part of a family tree. We are continuously living the ancestral life, reaching back for centuries, we are satisfying the appetites of unknown ancestors, nursing instincts which we think are our own, but which are quite incompatible with our character; we are not living our own lives, we are paying the debts

Ten thousand years is not all that long. It is only four hundred generations—counting a new generation every twenty-five years, four to a century, for a hundred centuries.