Quotes About Forebears

#1. All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes.

Erica Jong

#2. The nostalgic notion of the family orchards is lovely - all that wholesome fruit for our forebears to sit on the back steps biting into - but basically we were growing it to drink.

Barbara Holland

#3. If we have the courage and tenacity of our forebears, who stood firmly like a rock against the lash of slavery, we shall find a way to do for our day what they did for theirs.

Mary McLeod Bethune

#4. All of our forebears contributed to what South Africa has become. That does not, however, mean that I must apologize to anyone for being born a Zulu, or for having that culture.

Mangosuthu Buthelezi

#5. I'm glad to see that the crusading spirit of your forebears hasn't been entirely obliterated by rock and roll.

Ken Follett

#6. The new generation of researchers must be given the skills and values - not just scientific ideals, but also awareness of human weaknesses - that will enable it to correct its forebears' mistakes.

Heinrich Rohrer

#7. Whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship.

Barack Obama

#8. So long as men remember the wrongs done to their forebears, no peace will ever last.

George R R Martin

#9. Let us listen to the voices of our Forebears ... In the smoky cabin, souls that wish us well are murmuring.

Leopold Sedar Senghor

#10. You create your own audience, and your own community of peers, and in some ways you create your own forebears as well.

John D'Agata

#11. That all pretensions to being self-made hide the reciprocal truth, that we have unpayable debts to the world around us, to our community, to our forebears, to the ancients, to nature, to the gods.

Lewis Hyde

#12. Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.

Carter G. Woodson

#13. No man can say with certainty what the future may hold. But perhaps, in knowing what has already transpired, we can all do our part to avoid the mistakes of our forebears, to emulate their successes, and to create a world more harmonious for our children and their children, for generations to come.

George R R Martin

#14. She shook her head in perplexity. "I'll never know where you got the idea that you were destined for greatness." She dropped the rest of the rabbit in the pot and begun to clean the underside of its skin. She would use the fur. "You certainly didn't inherit it from your forebears.

Ken Follett

#15. Jefferson never entertained the folly that he was of immigrant stock. He considered the English settlers of America courageous conquerors, much like his Saxon forebears, to whom he compared them. To Jefferson, early Americans were the contemporary carriers of the Anglo-Saxon project.

Ilana Mercer

#16. I hear poets complaining: 'We face what our forebears did not face. We face TV. We face radio. We face this and that.'

Felix Dennis

#17. I carried out my plan because I felt The Chief had some fear of those of my race, of those uncountable forebears whose culmination lies in me. I wished to prove to him that a yellow man could save his armies.

Jorge Luis Borges

#18. More and more of us live segmented, compartmentalized lives. This isn't natural. For millions of years, our forebears knew everyone around them and everyone knew them.

Helen Fisher

#19. Eugenics was central to the entire Nazi enterprise, joined with romantic nativist and racist myths of the pure-bred Nordic. The emphasis on 'blood' called for a purifying of the nation's gene pool, so that Germans could regain the nobility and greatness of their genetically pure forebears.

Alison Thompson

#20. The mark of a Scot of all classes [is that] he ... remembers and cherishes the memory of his forebears, good or bad; and there burns alive in him a sense of identity with the dead even to the twentieth generation.

Robert Louis Stevenson

#21. One should not forget the sins of their forebears, but nor can one advance by paying witness only to the failings of the past. To bury the past is to progress, and only in breaking the chains that bind can you escape the prison your predecessors have laid.

Scott Warren

#22. While I was in school, trying to figure out how to write an essay that could both satisfy my nonfiction workshops and still pass as something hybrid-y enough for my poetry workshops, I was looking for models, for forebears.

John D'Agata

#23. If, in our world, there is any chance of becoming the person you haven't yet become ... will I know how to seize that chance, turn my life into a garden that will be completely different from my forebears'?

Muriel Barbery

#24. It is clear, then, that whatever genetic heritage we have, it is not a straitjacket that traps us forever in the "beastly" ways of our forebears. Evolution tells us where we came from, not where we can go.

Jerry A. Coyne

#25. Genealogy: A perverse preoccupation of those who seek to demonstrate that their forebears were better people than they are.

Sydney J. Harris

#26. Any spot for which a man's forebears have bled and died will forever be his homeland.

James A. Michener

#27. Each generation of rabbis is necessarily less perfect than the rabbis that came before, since each generation is more removed from the perfection of the Garden. Therefore, no rabbi is allowed to overturn any of his forebears' wisdom, since they are all, by definition, smarter than him.

Cory Doctorow

#28. Although European thinkers see the Greeks as their intellectual forebears, the Greeks themselves looked toward the East for the sources of true wisdom-to Egypt, Persia, and, during the early centuries of the common era, India.

Gananath Obeyesekere

#29. A child born today is more likely to reach retirement age than his forebears were to live to their fifth birthday.

Johan Norberg

#30. To slaughter grand and beautiful creatures like these tuskers, whether terrestrial or marine, solely to obtain a few teeth indicates that we have not evolved very much since the days our forebears lived in caves and saught to prove their superiority by adorning themselves with teeth and claws

Paul Watson

#31. 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

#32. A child is a part of the self, and of the loved partner; a representation of generations past; the genes of the forebears; the hope of the future; a source of love, pleasure, even narcissistic delight; a tie or a burden; and sometimes a symbol of the worst parts of the self and others.

Beverly Raphael

#33. For me, my 'X' replaced the white slave master name of 'Little' which some blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed on my parental forebears.

Malcolm X

#34. As social animals, we need to exchange juicy tales about someone - to connect with one another. For millions of years our forebears must have sat around the campfire, whispering about everyone they knew.

Helen Fisher

#35. Against the mutability of dream, the natural laws advocated by our bewigged Enlightenment forebears are powerless. Newton, for instance, insists on gravity and other prohibitions of the physical world, from which (while we are awake) we are never free. But we can fly in dreams.

Gregory Maguire

#36. Unfortunately, we cannot live our lives according to the moral and religious convictions or petrified dogmas of our forebears. We have an obligation to live by our own faith, forever renewing the traditions of the past and adapting them to the demands of own time and place.

Farquhar McHarg

#37. Justice requires us to remember that when any citizen denies his fellow, saying, 'His color is not mine,' or 'His beliefs are strange and different,' in that moment he betrays America, though his forebears created this nation.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#38. What I am has been to a considerable extent determined by what my forebears were, by how they chose to treat this place while they lived in it;

Wendell Berry

#39. Thank you, I thought fervently. Thank you, Slavic forebears, ye heavily into consonants. Ye fans of high-scoring Scrabble tiles. Ye who boldly dropped z's where no z's had been dropped before. I appreciate it.

Kate Hattemer

#40. The secret to economic growth lay in the fact that that each generation attacked Nature not only with its own energies and resources, but with the heritage of equipment accumulated by its forebears.

Robert Heilbroner

#41. OK, well maybe I have to get back to Judaism. In the sense that if I look at me and my forebears forever stretching back to I don't know, whenever there's no sense of place and therefore no sense of nationality.

Janet Suzman

#42. Contrary to the tenets of conventional wisdom, viral ideas and campaigns were not first transmitted via the electronic media of the Internet age. Their ideological forebears lived and replicated in the host coffee-houses, inns and taverns of the early eighteenth-century.

Gavin John Adams

#43. Riches should come as the reward for hard work, preferably by one's forebears

Steven Runciman

#44. The technical developments of almost every form of wealth [e.g., oil, minerals] are the forebears of Big Business; and Big Business, directly or indirectly, is the immediate cause of War.

Aleister Crowley

#45. And he imagines cars
and rides them in his dreams,
so lonely growing up among
the imaginary automobiles
and dead souls of Tarrytown
to create
out of his own imagination
the beauty of his wild
forebears - a mythology
he cannot inherit.

Allen Ginsberg

#46. My forebears were fantastically wealthy Armenians who came to England from India in the 19th century and did what foreign types do - they married into a penniless but well-bred local family.

Saul David

#47. My forebears refused to cut the sugar cane for plantation owners, and I am recognisably a product of that background.

Diane Abbott

#48. And yet one carries the sins of his forebears as one carries their features in his face. One bears their blood, and their honor or their blight.

Guillermo Del Toro