Top 100 Quotes About Our Ancestors
#1. In many ways, each of us is the sum total of what our ancestors were. The virtues they had may be our virtues, their strengths our strengths, and, in a way, their challenges could be our challenges.
James E. Faust
#2. They say that family is the place of safety. But sometimes this is the greatest lie; family is not sanctuary, it is not safety and succour. For some of us, it is the secret wound. Sooner or later we pay for the woundings of our ancestors.
Nayomi Munaweera
#3. Earth fell," said the Surgeon, "because the Will required us to atone for the sin our ancestors committed when they treated your ancestors like beasts. The quality of our poetry had nothing to do with it.
Robert Silverberg
#4. Today the major reason for our interest in Flatland is that for the first time we can achieve some of the dreams of our ancestors a century ago and obtain direct visual experience of phenomena in a dimension higher than our own.
Thomas Banchoff
#5. If during their education our youths become alienated from their language, history, ancestors, culture and civilization, it means there is a very serious educational problem there.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
#6. Right here, right now? This is precious. This is life. You're alive. Somehow, all of the genetic material of all those thousands of ancestors came together in the perfect combination to make you, exactly as you are. That's magical - it's the greatest kind of magic I know. Our very existence." My
Loretta Lost
#7. The time and intelligence that our ancestors spent on understanding the sovereignty revealed in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are directed by our contemporaries in affirming and validating the sovereignty of our needs, wants, and feelings.
Eugene H. Peterson
#8. The good old home habits of our ancestors are breaking up - it will be well if our virtue and our freedom do not follow them!
Lydia Maria Francis Child
#9. We are all motivated far more than we care to admit by characteristics inherited from our ancestors which individual experiences of childhood can modify, repress, or enhance, but cannot erase.
Agnes Meyer Driscoll
#10. In the developed world, we live 30 years longer, on average, than our ancestors born a century ago, but the price we pay for those added years is the rise of chronic diseases.
S. Jay Olshansky
#11. Our ancestors took this land. They took it and made it and held it. We do not give up what our ancestors gave us. They came across the sea and they fought here, and they built here and they're buried here. This is our land, mixed with our blood, strengthened with our bone. Ours!
Bernard Cornwell
#12. Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The "newness" in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components.
Carl Jung
#13. There are things in life that science will never be able to see. We have to rely on what has been passed from our ancestors, generation to generation.
Pawan Mishra
#14. That's why we sail. So our children can grow up and be proud of whom they are. We are healing our souls by reconnecting to our ancestors. As we voyage we are creating new stories within the tradition of the old stories, we are literally creating a new culture out of the old.
Nainoa Thompson
#15. The true God is to be venerated in obscure and fearful Places, with Horror in their Approaches, and thus did our Ancestors worship the Daemon in the form of great Stones.
Peter Ackroyd
#16. But it is obvious that our fathers, whose efforts have planted these great and prosperous cities along the once lonely trails of our own broad land, received all the fundamentals of civilization as a heritage from their European ancestors.
James Henry Breasted
#17. Though as a psychologist I like to think that nothing human is foreign to me, I admit to having been repeatedly flabbergasted by the insouciance, and sometimes relish, with which our ancestors carried out and witnessed unspeakable cruelties.
Steven Pinker
#18. It's clearly possible for a something to acquire higher intelligence than its ancestors: we evolved to be smarter than our ape-like ancestors, and Einstein was smarter than his parents.
Stephen Hawking
#19. Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created.
Walter Lippmann
#20. Our ancestors built temples for their gods. We build department stores.
David Mitchell
#21. Everyone, no matter what their cultural background, has a right to discover the sacred in nature; to heal and be redeemed spiritually by nature; and to revere the ancestors. We are all haunted and saved by our memories.
Martha Brooks
#22. The songs of our ancestors are also the songs of our children
Philip Carr-Gomm
#23. Our ancestors always thought of the worst thing that could happen, and that's why we're alive.
Fiona Apple
#24. It would be more honourable to our distinguished ancestors to praise them in words less, but in deeds to imitate them more.
Horace Mann
#25. Honor, justice, and humanity, call upon us to hold, and to transmit to our posterity, that liberty which we received from our ancestors. It is not our duty to leave wealth to our children, but it is our duty to leave liberty to them.
John Dickinson
#26. The past lives within the present, and our ancestors breathe through our children.
Elif Shafak
#27. I was being groomed as an undergraduate to specialize in Midwestern prehistory, but going back to my teenage days, my interest has always been in our early human ancestors. I wanted to work in Africa.
Donald Johanson
#28. In the last analysis, we must all, Indian and no-Indian, come together. This earth is our mother, this land is our shared heritage.
Our histories and fates are intertwined, no matter where our ancestors were born and how they interacted with each other.
Kent Nerburn
#29. If we want to set and enforce a limit on immigration, we have to be willing to say no to would-be immigrants who look a lot like our own ancestors, not because there's anything wrong with them, but simply because admitting them would exceed our legal limit.
Jan C. Ting
#30. He remembers that it was said to him, "Our ancestors were animal forms." But he does not remember that these forms were gods. This is the psychological basis for the emergence of Darwinism.
Rudolf Steiner
#31. Mushrooms are miniature pharmaceutical factories, and of the thousands of mushroom species in nature, our ancestors and modern scientists have identified several dozen that have a unique combination of talents that improve our health.
Paul Stamets
#32. W are all carrying the imprints of our most ancient ancestors. Not simply in the genetic code, but in the imprints of attention that are passed on.
Frederick Lenz
#33. I think we're going back to the way things use to be, before a bunch of European intellectuals in tights decided to draw a line between what's rational and what's not. I don't think our ancestors thought the distinction was necessary.
(pg 370)
G. Willow Wilson
#34. To understand and reconnect with our stories, the stories of the ancestors, is to build our identities.
Frank Delaney
#36. Even while Jerusalem was standing and the Jews were at peace with us, the practice of their sacred rites was at variance with the glory of our empire, the dignity of our name, the customs of our ancestors.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#37. All to whom want is terrible, upon whatever principle, ought to think themselves obliged to learn the sage maxims of our parsimonious ancestors, and attain the salutary arts of contracting expense; for without economy none can be rich, and with it few can be poor.
Samuel Johnson
#38. We pay for the mistakes of our ancestors, and it seems only fair that they should leave us the money to pay with.
Don Marquis
#39. There is no need to upset about the fact that our ancestors were monkeys, because they are capable chaps! Don't be sad about the truth, just understand the truth!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#40. All this very plausible reasoning does not convince me, as it has not convinced the wisest of our Statesmen, that our ancestors erred in laying it down as an axiom of policy that the toleration of Irregularity is incompatible with the safety of the State.
Edwin A. Abbott
#41. Humanity is still advancing; and it will probably continue to advance for hundreds of thousands of years more, always on condition that we know how to keep the same line of advance as our ancestors towards ever greater consciousness and complexity.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#42. What is the fire in our belly but the eternal flame of a thousand ancestors.
Robert Breault
#43. What task could be more agreeable than to tell of the benefits conferred on us by our ancestors, so that you may get to know the achievements of those from whom you have received both the basis of your beliefs and the inspiration to conduct your life properly.
William Of Malmesbury
#44. With this realization, came a growing need for men and women willing to take up arms in an effort to protect our American way of life and the freedoms so many of our ancestors died to entrench.
Jim Walsh
#45. I'm just confused as to where we lost that in America because it is everyone's God-given right to think the way they think and that's fine. That's why our ancestors came here to America, to believe what they want, pray how they want and follow a religion with whoever they want.
Angie Harmon
#46. Our responsibility is not to speculate endlessly about the possible futures of our daughter species, but to become, with as much panache as we can afford, their ancestors.
Geoffrey Miller
#47. You speak of the good conduct of your ancestors. As your own conduct is under discussion, and not theirs, I cannot see how their former good character can at all serve your present purpose. Fortunately for our country, every man stands upon his own merit.
Stephen Decatur
#48. Supposition all our lives shall be stuck full of eyes; For treason is but trusted like the fox, Who, ne'er so tame, so cherished and locked up, Will have a wild trick of his ancestors.
William Shakespeare
#49. We must create the Georgia that our ancestors dreamed of, the Georgia that we dream of.
Mikheil Saakashvili
#50. This is because our personal genetic tree is not equivalent to our genealogical tree, which is to say that not every one of our direct ancestors has contributed to our genome.
Christine Kenneally
#51. Genealogy is among the fastest-growing leisure pursuits in the U.K. Indeed, the urge to uncover the truth about our ancestors has proved so compelling that, when the 1901 census first went online, the website crashed after a million people logged on within hours of its launch.
Rory Bremner
#52. Our ancestors move along with us, in underground rivers and springs too deep for chaos to reach.
Wally Lamb
#53. Breathing air is a liberating experience. It freed our ancestors from the constraints of staying wet or having to remain within easy reach of water for refuge, respiration or reproduction. But the biggest change it made in our lives was to expose us to a whole new range of sensory experience.
Lyall Watson
#54. If we do not get control of our borders, by 2050 Americans of European descent will be a minority in the nation their ancestors created and built. No nation has ever undergone so radical a demographic transformation and survived.
Pat Buchanan
#55. As far as benefits to reading historical novels, there are several! For one thing, you learn about life in another era. Secondly, these novels help us to develop a deeper understanding of the legacy of women who came before us and the strides made by our ancestors.
Mary Pope Osborne
#56. Once we lose our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe which dwarfs
in time, in space, and in potential
the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.
Carl Sagan
#57. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.
G.K. Chesterton
#58. Our Ancestors knew that healing comes in cycles and circles.
One generation carries the pain so that the next can live and heal.
One cannot live without the other, each is the other's hope, meaning & strength.
Gemma B. Benton
#59. Our ancestors sought knowledge, but we, their descendants, glorify ignorance.
S.J. Kincaid
#60. There is no escape - we pay for the violence of our ancestors.
Frank Herbert
#61. We are connected, like it or not, to the ancestors of our biological families, and their templates
Robert Moss
#63. OUR history begins before we are born. We represent the hereditary influences of our race, and our ancestors virtually live in us.
James Nasmyth
#64. I think, in many people's minds, the Confederate battle flag is not only a memorial to our ancestors, which is perfectly OK, but also a symbol of white superiority and an inclination for people to believe that even slavery would've been OK.
Jimmy Carter
#65. What I would like to do is to leave behind a sustainable entity of a set of companies that operate in an exemplary manner in terms of ethics, values and continue what our ancestors left behind.
Ratan Tata
#66. The voices of our ancestors telling of our glorious past, our culture, and what it means to be an Indian.
Allen Sapp
#67. In the West the past is like a dead animal. It is a carcass picked at by the flies that call themselves historians and biographers. But in my culture the past lives. My people feel this way in part because death does not separate us from our ancestors.
Miriam Makeba
#68. As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved Echo of our ancestors, the virgin America, has been abandoned. We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#69. Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.
Daniel J. Levitin
#70. The people who have recently come to this country to work and better their lives should be given the same opportunities that our parents, grandparents, and ancestors were given.
Jose Serrano
#71. We will embarrass our descendants, just as our ancestors embarrass us. This is moral progress.
Sam Harris
#73. When I was a child, my parents took my brothers and me to Port-au-Prince during the summer so we could get to know the country of our ancestors. Because Haiti is an island, the beach is everywhere. Haitians are particular, even snobby, about beaches.
Roxane Gay
#74. In that regard we are different from our ancestors of a few centuries ago, who approved, carried out, and even savored the infliction of unspeakable agony on other living beings. What were these people feeling? And why don't we feel it today?
Steven Pinker
#75. Art is viable when it finds elements in the surrounding environment. Our ancestors drew their subject matter from the religious attitudes which weighed on their souls. We must now learn to draw inspiration from the tangible miracles around us.
Umberto Boccioni
#76. Our ancestors used to play with snakes, we play with mouse.
Narendra Modi
#77. It is ourselves alone that make our days lucky or unlucky. Away, then, with a vain prejudice, the invention of the priesthood, which has been transmitted by our ancestors to an ignorant people.
Voltaire
#78. We do not go to the theatre like our ancestors, to escape from the pressure of reality, so much as to confirm our experience of it.
Charles Lamb
#79. Our ancestors ... purged their guilt by banishment, not death. And by so doing, they stopped that endless vicious cycle of murder and revenge.
Euripides
#80. We are the people of Misr," the old woman rasped. "Since our Sunni ancestors fled from Nilotic al-Ourouba, we have known flight and death. The young go on that our people shall not die.
Frank Herbert
#81. Darwin speculated that "music tones and rhythms were used by our half-human ancestors, during the season of courtship, when animals of all kinds are excited not only by love, but by strong passions of jealousy, rivalry, and triumph" and that speech arose, secondarily, from this primal music.
Oliver Sacks
#82. Going where no man has gone before is more difficult than it sounds. Our cousins and ancestors were no less curious than we are, and were perhaps bolder. This world is their tomb.
You should look under the bed.
N.D. Wilson
#83. Civilized life has altogether grown too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must provide a harmless outlets for the impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in hunting.
Bertrand Russell
#84. Life in the twentieth century undeniably has ... such richness, joy and adventure as were unknown to our ancestors except in their dreams.
Arthur Compton
#85. Archaeological materials are not mute. They speak their own language. And they need to be used for the great source they are to help unravel the spirituality of those of our ancestors who predate the Indo-Europeans by many thousands of years.
Marija Gimbutas
#86. If we do not fight to protect and preserve the freedom our ancestors died to obtain for us, our children will die to get it back.
M.J. Leonard
#87. Just as our ancient ancestors drew animals on cave walls and carved animals from wood and bone, we decorate our homes with animal prints and motifs, give our children stuffed animals to clutch, cartoon animals to watch, animal stories to read.
Diane Ackerman
#88. Our ancestors went to the woods to find fuel; they set snares there for birds and gathered nuts and fungi.
John Burnside
#89. We should not look down on our first ancestors.
Alice Walker
#90. Our ancestors wholeheartedly sacrificed their lives to fight against tyranny, and we are allowing that very same tyranny to exist! Let us open our eyes!
Yanan Melo
#91. Sacrifice is a state of mind in which our thoughts turn with longing [toward Heaven, the Ancestors], It is the supreme expression of loyalty, love, and respect.
Xunzi
#92. Most of what we know about human evolution comes from these: the fossilized bones of our ancestors. With their help, we've traced our evolution from small furry creatures to the big-brained beings we've become today. But bones can't tell us everything.
Ziya Tong
#93. The desire to fly is an idea handed down to us by our ancestors who ... looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space ... on the infinite highway of the air.
Wilbur Wright
#94. Learning from the experiences of our ancestors, let us together create knowledge for all that benefits all.
Kailash Satyarthi
#95. 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
#96. Our cautious ancestors, when yawning, blocked the way to the entrance of evil spirits by putting their hands before their mouths. We find a reason for the gesture in the delicacy of manner which forbids an indecent exposure.
George Herbert Mead
#97. The wisdom of our parents, grandparents, ancestors. In each individual life, it seems, we must first reject that wisdom, then later come to appreciate it.
Tad Williams
#98. We came to America, either ourselves or in the persons of our ancestors, to better the ideals of men, to make them see finer things than they had seen before, to get rid of the things that divide and to make sure of the things that unite.
Woodrow Wilson
#99. From the inception of our nation our American ancestors intended for the United States to operate under a precious-metals monetary system or, more specifically, under a monetary system in which people used gold and silver coins rather than paper money as the media of exchange.
Jacob G. Hornberger
#100. The house is made up of the spirits of our ancestors. Did you think they would lie idly by while we were under attack?
'Cuz, yeah, didn't everybody's ancestors rise up and destroy enemies.
Christine Feehan
