Top 100 Quotes About Ancestry
#1. The foolish families worry over blood. I care nothing for purity of family or ancestry. That is a vain thing. I care only for strength. What a man can do to other men, women.
Pierce Brown
#2. We really invented the genre of tracing family trees and going back as far as we could on the paper trail. When the paper trail disappeared, we used DNA analysis. The technology was just being invented that allowed you to trace ancestry through DNA.
Henry Louis Gates
#3. While visiting places in the South with my heart really open, I realized how important people in certain geographical spots were to me, what they symbolize, how I'm still connected to them and how much they are a part of my ancestry, both musical and real.
Rosanne Cash
#4. Men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several centuries. In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past.
James Russell Lowell
#5. Because survival and love are the immortal truths of humankind, no generation is a total stranger to the forerunner generations of humankind.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#6. The Trail of Tears has a great deal of meaning for every person of American Indian ancestry, whether they are Cherokee or not. For me, it has always stood for what is best and worst about the history of the United States.
Joseph Bruchac
#7. Don't you dare take the lazy way. It's too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry. Don't let me catch you doing it! Now
look close at me so you will remember. Whatever you do, it will be you who do.
John Steinbeck
#8. Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality.
Harlan Stone
#9. Many people believe that determining who is 'black' is rather easy, a task simplified by the administration of the one-drop rule. Under the one-drop rule, any discernible African ancestry stamps a person as 'black.'
Randall Kennedy
#10. 'Cullum' is Scottish, but I'm nowhere near Scottish. My mother is Burmese, and my father is of German, Jewish, English ancestry.
Jamie Cullum
#11. Conventional names define a person's past: ancestry, ethnicity, nationality, religion. I am not who I was ten years ago and certainly not who I will be in twenty years
FM-2030
#12. The precise form of an individual's activity is determined, of course, by the equipment with which he came into the world. In other words, it is determined by his heredity.
Henry Louis Gates
#14. What can ennoble sots, or slaves, or cowards? Alas! not all the blood, of all the Howards.
Alexander Pope
#15. My accent is of African ancestry and so is my origin and I have no intention to change any of it. Therefore nobody should expect me to fraudulently behave as if I was anything else.
Gloria D. Gonsalves
#16. A Nation ... is a group of persons united by a common error about their ancestry, and a common dislike of their neighbors
Karl Deutsch
#17. My life shall be free and broad and great, and I will not be the slave to the sense delights which chained my ancient ancestry. I reject the heritage. I break the entail. And who are you to say I am unwise?
Jack London
#18. Some decent regulated pre-eminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth, is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolite.
Edmund Burke
#19. Birth and ancestry, and that which we have not ourselves achieved, we can scarcely call our own.
Ovid
#20. Individually, every grain of sand brushing against my hands represents a story, an experience, and a block for me to build upon for the next generation.
Raquel Cepeda
#21. My forefathers didn't come over on the Mayflower, but they met the boat.
Will Rogers
#22. Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.
Van Wyck Brooks
#23. Whether focused on ancestry, visible race, or combinations of the two, systems of ranked difference aimed to separate people into hierarchies of inequality while incorporating them in colonial production, justifying exploitations with claims of essential difference.
John Tutino
#24. It is disgraceful when the passers-by exclaim, O ancient house! alas, how unlike is thy present master to thy former one.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#25. It turns out that every person alive today can trace his or her ancestry back to Africa. Everyone's DNA tells a story of a journey from an African homeland to wherever you live.
Spencer Wells
#26. Daddy once told me there's a rage passed down to every black man from his ancestors, born the moment they couldn't stop the slave masters from hurting their families. Daddy also said there's nothing more dangerous than when that rage is activated.
Angie Thomas
#27. The fountain of youth resides in our memory. You will never outlive your shadow.
Lorin Morgan-Richards
#28. Some people will deny anything that displeases or scares them: unusual pain in their chests, unwanted lumps beneath their skin, or the fact that humans share ancestry with apes are a few examples. Another is climate change.
Michael Specter
#29. Our ancestry streches back through the life forms and into the stars, back into the beginnings of the primeval fireball. This universe is a single multiform energetic unfolding of matter, mind, intelligence and life.
Brian Swimme
#30. Blood can help make family, but family often transcends blood.
DaShanne Stokes
#31. There are many kinds of conceit, but the chief one is to let people know what a very ancient and gifted family one descends from.
Benvenuto Cellini
#32. Genealogy itself is something of a privilege, coming far more easily to those of us for whom enslavement, conquest, and dispossession of our land has not been our lot.
Tim Wise
#33. There is no nobler profession, nor no greater calling, than to be among those unheralded many who gave and give their lives to the preservation of human knowledge, passed with commitment and care from one generation to the next.
Laurence Overmire
#34. The principle on which this country was founded and by which it has always been governed is that Americanism is a matter of the mind and heart; Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race or ancestry.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#35. The deeply satisfying aspect of the rediscovery of Zora Neale Hurston is that black women generated it primarily to establish a maternal literary ancestry.
Zora Neale Hurston
#36. Descendants of New England pioneers are proud of their ancestry and glad to proclaim the fact that so far as the United States are concerned, New England is in deed the cradle of religious liberty.
Paul Harris
#37. Some genealogies claimed to be able to trace the Maclean ancestry even further back, going as far as Julius Caesar, and, in some cases, admittedly more tendentiously, to the ancient Celtic god of the sun.
Alexander McCall Smith
#38. I've never felt grounded because of my ancestry or my gender. I think until women get away from that they're not going to be great writers.
Patti Smith
#40. It is almost impossible to overemphasize the importance with which ancestry is held in the Middle East and North Africa.
Tahir Shah
#41. I didn't know much about my Native American ancestry, but as I got older I became more interested in it.
Alan Robinson
#42. And, you know, the fact is, if you believe in evolution, we all have a common ancestor, and we all have a common ancestry with the plant in the lobby. This is what evolution tells us. And, it's true. It's kind of unbelievable.
Jeff Hawkins
#43. For those of us who are fortunate to share an Irish ancestry, we take great pride in the contributions that Irish-Americans.
John F. Kerry
#44. We are all descendants of murderers and thieves.
Amanda Sledz
#45. Muslim citizens should never be classified according to their creed, origin, ancestry or culture. After all, I don't define my political or social position by reference to the Christian faith.
Gilles Kepel
#46. Wealth is also defined by family, connection to our ancestry, and our best vision of the future. All of these find their inner spirit, their constancy, and their strength in the values that shape our thinking and our actions.
Nainoa Thompson
#47. In the distance, mongrel dogs were howling out the coyote portion of their ancestry. All the sounds of the night seemed to pass through a hollow tunnel of indefinite length.
Warren Eyster
#48. If the means were available, we could trace our ancestry - yours and mine - back to the first blob of life-like material that came into being on the planet.
Clifford D. Simak
#49. No self is of itself alone. It has a long chain of intellectual ancestors. The "I" is chained to ancestry by many factors ... This is not mere allegory, but an eternal memory.
Erwin Schrodinger
#50. It is the highest of earthly honors to be descended from the great and good. They alone cry out against a noble ancestry who have none of their own.
Ben Jonson
#51. She wakes up all at once, all over, smooth as a cat. Probably there's cat in her ancestry someplace. Those old noble French families ... " "No telling, with the French. Inventive people.
Joanna Bourne
#52. I discovered that there is Indian blood in my ancestry on my father's side - a fact that had not been talked about in my family. No wonder I've often been cast in exotic roles - Indian princesses, Russian revolutionaries, Algerians, Gypsies and Greeks.
Diana Quick
#53. You, the sons of the pioneers, if you are true to your ancestry, must make your lives as worthy as they made theirs. They sought for true success, and therefore they did not seek ease. They knew that success comes only to those who lead the life of endeavor
Theodore Roosevelt
#54. I knew my mother was - well, her ancestry dated back to John Quincy Adams, so she was totally not Latina. She was definitely whatever you call it - white bread, shall we say?
Raquel Welch
#55. Though you be sprung in direct line from Hercules, if you show a lowborn meanness, that long succession of ancestors whom you disgrace are so many witnesses against you; and this grand display of their tarnished glory but serves to make your ignominy more evident.
Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux
#56. DNA ties us all together; we share ancestry with barracuda and bacteria and mushrooms, if you go far enough back.
Spencer Wells
#57. Oblonsy was fond of a pleasant joke, and sometimes liked to perplex a simple-minded man by observing that if you're going to be proud of your ancestry, why stop short at Prince Rurik and repudiate your oldest ancestor - the ape?
Leo Tolstoy
#58. All of the guests on 'Faces of America' were deeply moved by what we revealed about their ancestry. We were able to trace the ancestry of Native American writer Louise Erdrich back to 438 A.D. We found that Queen Noor is descended from royalty, and that's before she married King Hussein of Jordan.
Henry Louis Gates
#59. The original mixed ancestry of the Jews and their subsequent history of intermixture with every people among whom they have lived and continue to live ...
Ashley Montagu
#60. We should feel empowered by where we came from and who we are, not hide it. It is important to acknowledge that everything we do affects our ancestors as much as they have affected us.
Lorin Morgan-Richards
#61. The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
(About Books; Recoiling, Rereading, Retelling, New York Times, February 22, 1987)
Anatole Broyard
#62. When I'm in England, I know I'm a visitor, but being a white man in England with ancestry that's German and Italian, I have a history with the Romans and the Saxons. I feel some connection and ancestry here, as weird as that sounds.
Nicolas Cage
#63. People who can comfort the dead can also chase after them to hurt them further-a reverse ancestor worship.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#66. The theater, when it is potent enough to deserve its ancestry, is always dangerous; that is why it is instinctively feared by people who do not want change, but only preservation of the status quo.
Hallie Flanagan
#67. Some men by ancestry are only the shadow of a mighty name.
Lucan
#68. It is with antiquity as with ancestry, nations are proud of the one, and individuals of the other; but if they are nothing in themselves, that which is their pride ought to be their humiliation.
Charles Caleb Colton
#69. The behavior of an individual is determined not by his racial affiliation, but by the character of his ancestry and his cultural environment.
Franz Boas
#70. We live in a society that celebrates familial connection above any other kind of relationship. We are shown photos of our great-grandparents and encouraged to marvel over facial similarities. We are told to take pride in our bloodlines, celebrate our ancestry.
Lynn Coady
#71. Both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.
Herman Melville
#72. I get anxious. That lovely Jewish guilt that comes with ancestry.
Maya Rudolph
#73. A person in search of his ancestors naturally likes to believe the best of them, and the best in terms of contemporary standards. Where genealogical facts are few, and these located in the remote past, reconstruction of family history is often more imaginative than correct.
James G. Leyburn
#75. It is better to be the builder of our own name than to be indebted by descent for the proudest gifts known to the books of heraldry.
Hosea Ballou
#76. It has been estimated that one third of our Western civilization bears the mark of its Jewish ancestry.
Huston Smith
#77. It's too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry.
John Steinbeck
#78. I've got German, Cornish and Scottish ancestry. It might help explain my affinity for forests, the sea, and fatty foods.
Kyle MacLachlan
#79. Ancestry is most important to those who have done nothing themselves.
Louis L'Amour
#81. All scientists agree that evolution has occurred - that all life comes from a common ancestry, that there has been extinction, and that new taxa, new biological groups, have arisen. The question is, is natural selection enough to explain evolution? Is it the driver of evolution?
Lynn Margulis
#82. do other animals have human emotions? Yes, they do. Do humans have animal emotions? Yes; they're largely the same. Fear, aggression, well-being, anxiety, and pleasure are the emotions of shared brain structures and shared chemistries, originated in shared ancestry.
Carl Safina
#83. My guess is that the Jonathan would be as out of place in England or Kazakhstan, the native ground of its ancestors, as I would be in Russia, the native ground of my own. The arrow of natural history won't be reversed: by now the Jonathan's as much an American as I am.
Michael Pollan
#84. The man who has nothing to boast of but his illustrious ancestry is like the potato - the best part under ground.
Thomas Overbury
#86. Ever since I watched 'Roots,' I've dreamed of tracing my African ancestry and helping other people do the same.
Henry Louis Gates
#87. Being a mixed-blood person of Ojibway and European ancestry, I always found that I only heard one side of the story - that was the conquerers' side, the side of the French Jesuit missionaries that came to live in what is now Ontario.
Joseph Boyden
#88. Unite all people of African ancestry of the world to one great body to establish a country and absolute government of their own.
Marcus Garvey
#89. Surely one zoo in the world should have the courage to draw the ultimate conclusion about our ancestry? A cage with Homo Sapiens in all its varying forms, perhaps then we would understand ourselves better. The question of course is whether the other animals would approve of it.
Cees Nooteboom
#90. We are all creatures of our ancestry! There is no right and wrong, objectively.
Piers Anthony
#92. Her parents could have named her Aria, or Harmonia, or Tessitura, or a hundred other clever names that would have alluded to her ancestry. But they weren't for her, these names that roll or sparkle or play or simply proclaim, I am normal!
No, it was Sing. A name and a command.
Adi Rule
#94. Part of my ancestry is Cherokee. And in that tradition, you become an adult when you're 52.
Alice Walker
#96. Dead people are easy to love. It's the living ones who are hard.
Laurence Overmire
#97. A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and a common hatred of its neighbors.
William Ralph Inge
#98. There is no more fascinating subject in which a person may become occupied than an examination into the history of his ancestry.
Archibald F. Bennett
#99. I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.
V.S. Naipaul
#100. No one is innocent in the tide of history. Everyone has kings and slaves in his past. Everyone has saints and sinners. We are not to blame for the actions of our ancestors. We can only try to be the best we can, no matter what our heritage, to strive for a better future for all.
Diana Peterfreund
