Top 100 Quotes About Our Ancestors
#1. Our ancestors have invented, we can at least innovate.
Amit Kalantri
#2. We, today, stand on the shoulders of our predecessors who have gone before us. We, as their successors, must catch the torch of freedom and liberty passed on to us by our ancestors. We cannot lose in this battle.
Benjamin E. Mays
#3. The notion of feelings as an integral part of illness is universal - not only across continents and peoples, but across the divide of time that separates us from our ancestors.
Esther M. Sternberg
#4. In religion as in parenthood, uncritical loyalty to our ancestors may implicate us in an injustice against our descendants: imprisoning them in the errors of our ancestors.
Brian D. McLaren
#6. Al leaned close, voice dangerous as he whispered, "We don't forget, Rachel, and it's not as if it was our ancestors who were betrayed. It was us.
Kim Harrison
#7. Civilization is always threatened from below, by patterns of belief and emotion that may once have been useful to our ancestors, but that are useful no longer.
Roger Scruton
#8. It was through cooking food and sharing it with each other that our ancestors learned how to become social animals.
Ruth Reichl
#9. We talk much more about individualism and liberty than our ancestors. But as so often happens, when anything becomes conscious, the consciousness is compensatory for absence in practice.
John Dewey
#10. Our ancestors are our children; we peer through a hole in the wall and watch them play in their rooms, and they can't see us.
Amin Maalouf
#11. The longest tyranny that ever sway'd
Was that wherein our ancestors betray'd
Their free-born reason to the Stagirite [Aristotle],
And made his torch their universal light.
So truth, while only one suppli'd the state,
Grew scarce, and dear, and yet sophisticate.
John Dryden
#12. 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
#13. P 18 - Hundreds of thousands of years ago our ancestors of the dim and distant past faced the same problems which we must face in the same primeval forest. That we are here today evidences their victory.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
#14. We have either to progress or to degenerate. Our ancestors did great things in the past, but we have to grow into a fuller life and march beyond even their great achievements.
Swami Vivekananda
#15. to help our ancestors survive, the brain evolved a negativity bias that makes it like Velcro for bad experiences but Teflon for good ones.
Rick Hanson
#16. Frankly, our ancestors don't seem much to brag about. I mean, look at the state they left us in, with the wars, the broken planet. Clearly, they didn't care about what would happen to the people who came after them.
Suzanne Collins
#17. If you spend fifteen minutes in a shopping mall, you will pass more people than our ancestors saw during their entire lifetimes.
Rolf Dobelli
#18. ...we can do some historical research to see how our ancestors lived. We will quickly discover that we are living in what to them would have been a dream world that we tend to take for granted things that our ancestors had to live without...
William B. Irvine
#19. And I saw for the first time how, despite the isolation of our own lives, we are always connected to our ancestors; our bodies hold the memories of those who came before us, whether it is the features we inherit or a disposition that is etched into our soul.
Alyson Richman
#20. If we are to make progress, we must not repeat history but make new history. We must add to the inheritance left by our ancestors. If we may make new discoveries and inventions in the phenomenal world, must we declare our bankruptcy in the spiritual domain? Is
Paramahansa Yogananda
#21. That is one of the reasons I oppose this whole Affirmative Action business. We are not supposed to be judged based on what our ancestors did or suffered. We are supposed to be judged as individuals, based on what we are able to achieve.
Alan Keyes
#22. ...we might be nothing more than the dreams of our ancestors, returning always to those horrors too great to resolve.
Liam Howley
#23. Traditionally, our ancestors boiled mushrooms in water to make a soothing tea. Boiling served several purposes: killing contaminants, softening the flesh, and extracting the rich soluble polysaccharides.
Paul Stamets
#24. We Southerners are a strong lot. Like our ancestors before us, we will survive. I will never lose faith. I am standing on the promise that tomorrow will be a better day.
Nancy B. Brewer
#25. Life is surely given us for higher purposes than to gather what our ancestors have wisely thrown away, and to learn what is of no value but because it has been forgotten.
Samuel Johnson
#26. We're the first people of the Western Hemisphere. American history doesn't start with Plymouth Rock; it starts with our ancestors. Others might call us "wetbacks," but we've had 40,000 years to dry out.
Mario T. Garcia
#27. Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.
G.K. Chesterton
#28. We must wake up to the insane reality of our time. We are all irresponsible, unless we demand from the responsible decision makers that modern armaments must no longer be made available to people whose former battle axes and swords our ancestors condemned.
Thor Heyerdahl
#29. Whereas our ancestors (not of choice) were the first successful cultivators of the wilds of America, we their descendants feel ourselves entitled to participate in the blessings of her luxuriant soil.
Richard Allen
#30. The written word is the only anchor we have in life. How extraordinary would it be if we had even three or four paragraphs written honestly about their lives by our ancestors?
Randy Wayne White
#31. Our ancestors, who were able to survive and reproduce under unimaginably harsh environmental circumstances, refined and perfected the human genetic recipe.
Mark Sisson
#32. It is possible that strong levels of belief in God, gods, spirits or the supernatural might have given our ancestors considerable comforts and advantages.
Robert Winston
#33. The cold hand of the past emerges from the grave of our ancestors, grips us by the neck and directs our gaze towards a single future. We
Yuval Noah Harari
#34. All of us in the Ball family in South Carolina, from the time we're children, hear stories about our ancestors, the slave owners.
Edward Ball
#35. Posterity always degenerates till it becomes our ancestors.
Horace Walpole
#36. A walk through an old graveyard shows our ancestors often had more dead children than we have live ones.
P. J. O'Rourke
#37. Every breath is a sacrament, an affirmation of our connection with all other living things, a renewal of our link with our ancestors and a contribution to generations yet to come. Our breath is a part of life's breath, the ocean of air that envelopes the earth.
David Suzuki
#38. I believe dreams connect us to our ancestors and it is through creativity that we can tap into this in the conscious state. Creativity is a sort of trance that we have as artists that erases time and space.
Lorin Morgan-Richards
#39. Not voting is one of the worst things that could happen in our community. You can vote for whoever you want to, but choosing not to vote spits in the face of our ancestors who fought for our right to vote.
Otis Moss III
#40. There are things we don't do. From this moment forth, let us all ensure our every action reflects well on us and our ancestors. Let us live to the highest standards, lest we win this war only to find ourselves staring in the mirror at the face of our late enemy.
Jack Campbell
#41. Compared to people living only a few generations ago, we have enormously greater opportunities to have a good time, yet there is no indication that we actually enjoy life more than our ancestors did. Opportunities alone, however, are not enough. We also need the skills to make use of them.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#42. Having culture means we are the only animal that acquires the rules of its daily living from the accumulated knowledge of our ancestors, rather than from the genes they pass to us.
Mark Pagel
#43. Our ancestors who changed the world did so through new ideas which came to them as they acted.
Raymond Charles Barker
#44. The four Clans will be enemies until the end. And yet we all want the same things: prey to hunt, a safe territory to raise our kits, and peace to share dreams with our ancestors. Why must we hate one another over such simple desires?
- Pinestar to Bluefur Bluestar's Prophecy, page 244
Erin Hunter
#45. When it's all over and the dust from our Ancestors bodies and our own settle from the four winds only then will we see that we were here!
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#46. If the Modern Technical Age is to remain human, it cannot overlook the trust that our ancestors have left with us. Our past cannot be mere matter for a more or less curious utilitarianism, like iron deposits, say, on the moon.
Marshall G.S. Hodgson
#47. Well, how'd we get to talking about our ancestors? People think we don't talk about anything else in Charleston.
Josephine Pinckney
#48. When our hearts turn to our ancestors, something changes inside us. We feel part of something greater than ourselves. Our inborn yearnings for family connections are fulfilled when we are linked to our ancestors ...
Russell M. Nelson
#49. We don't inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.
David Brower
#50. Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.
Edward Dahlberg
#52. Good birth is a fine thing, but the merit is our ancestors.
Plutarch
#53. Our ancestors have a vested interest in our wellbeing and so are more easily motivated to intercede for us and also are more closely connected to us.
Morgan Daimler
#54. We must act as if we answer to, and only answer to, our Ancestors, our children, and the unborn.
Amilcar Cabral
#55. Life existed on Earth for nearly four billion years before anything remotely resembling a human being showed up. And even then, when we started to branch off from other apes about 10,000,000 years ago, our ancestors looked pretty different.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#56. If We Lose The Ways Of Our Ancestors, We Lose Ourselves.
Gail Johnston
#57. I don't think there was a thunderclap or a divine spark that suddenly made one species smart. You can see, in our ancestors, there was a gradual expansion of the brain; there was an expansion of the complexity of tools.
Steven Pinker
#58. The heirloom biblical wheat of our ancestors is something modern humans never eat.
Rick Warren
#59. Our ancestors relied upon their advanced brains to survive during times of food shortage, and fortunately, the human brain is able to utilize body fat as an extremely efficient fuel to sustain function when glucose-providing food is unavailable.
David Perlmutter
#60. We are a continuum. Just as we reach back to our ancestors for our fundamental values, so we, as guardians of that legacy, must reach ahead to our children and their children. And we do so with a sense of sacredness in that reaching.
Paul Tsongas
#61. For nearly 2 million years, our ancestors survived and thrived and spread across the planet because they could run other mammals into heat exhaustion.
Christopher McDougall
#62. Finding a homeland is not the same as dwelling in the place where our ancestors once used to live. - KRZYSZTOF CZYZEWSKI
Tony Judt
#63. If our ancestors could see us today, surely they would think us gods.
Dan Brown
#64. People who look like human beings are not human beings. Strange people are amongst us. We must be careful. Our lives are changing. Our gods are silent. Our ancestors are silent. A great something is going to come from the sky and change the face of the earth.
Ben Okri
#65. Lectio divina provides us with a discipline, developed and handed down by our ancestors, for recovering the context, restoring the intricate
web of relationships to which the Scriptures give witness but that are so easily lost or obscured in the act of writing.
Eugene H. Peterson
#66. In a sense, all Americans are battle-born. Our ancestors came here for something better.
Brandon Flowers
#67. We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.
Shirley Abbott
#68. Our ancestors went for days without anything to eat, and carbohydrates were extremely scarce for two million years. The truth is, fat is the preferred fuel for human metabolism.
Mark Sisson
#69. Our ancestors worshipped the Sun, and they were not that foolish. It makes sense to revere the Sun and the stars, for we are their children.
Carl Sagan
#70. Very long ago our ancestors had moral systems. Our current institutions are only a couple of thousand years old, which is really not old in the eyes of a biologist.
Frans De Waal
#71. I'm not a fan of everything that our ancestors did. But some practices are worth reviving. One of them is looking upon marriage as a sacred partnership between two souls; not as a political alliance between two power centres.
Amish Tripathi
#72. The only way we are going to reduce disease, is to go backward to the diets and lifestyles of our ancestors.
Denis Parsons Burkitt
#73. Had the Neanderthals survived, would we still imagine ourselves to be a creature apart? Perhaps this is exactly why our ancestors wiped out the Neanderthals. They were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate.
Yuval Noah Harari
#74. My world, which once seemed so broad and full of possibilities, began to shrink as my need for security grew. Why could that be? It must be a quality we inherited from when our ancestors lived in caves. Groups provide protection; loners die.
Paulo Coelho
#75. Our ancestors are totally essential to our every waking moment, although most of us don't even have the faintest idea about their lives, their trials, their hardships or challenges.
Annie Lennox
#76. The fact is, we are much more afraid of life than our ancestors, and cannot find it inourhearts either tomarry or not tomarry.Marriage isterrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#77. Good food for free has been the holy grail of foragers since our ancestors first climbed down from the trees.
Tristram Stuart
#78. Crafts make us feel rooted, give us a sense of belonging and connect us with our history. Our ancestors used to create these crafts out of necessity, and now we do them for fun, to make money and to express ourselves.
Phyllis George
#79. We are not primitive. We live differently to you, but we do not live exactly like our grandparents did, nor do you. Were your ancestors 'primitive'? I don't think so. We respect our ancestors. We love our children. This is the same for all people.
Roy Sesana
#80. Food binds us to our roots as strongly as any song or poem. Many of us have learned more about our ancestors in the kitchen than we ever will from a book.
Anna Thomas
#81. My response is being written with ink and paper in the glorious tradition of our ancestors and then transcribed by Ms. Vliegenthart into a series of 1s and 0s to travel through the insipid web which has lately ensnared our species, so I apologize for any errors or omissions that may result. "'Given
John Green
#82. I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors.
Barack Obama
#83. Our ancestors are an ever widening circle of hope.
Toni Morrison
#84. The key reason why we are richer than our ancestors is that these ancestors have bequeathed us buildings, factories and machines that have given us a high living standard to start with. Driven by irresponsible policy makers, America's present generation is consuming the nation's capital.
Kurt Richebacher
#85. The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.
Alain De Botton
#86. The only bubble in the flat champagne of February is Valentine's Day. It was no accident that our ancestors pinned Valentine's Day on February's shirt: he or she lucky enough to have a lover in frigid, antsy February has cause for celebration, indeed.
Tom Robbins
#87. I couldn't think. The basics of my life seemed altered and thrown into question. After all, our families
our ancestors
are our identities. Biology is destiny.
I'm not who you think I am, I had said to T.J. the last time I'd seen him. Maybe I wasn't who I'd thought I was either.
Aimee Friedman
#88. I write to keep in contact with our ancestors and to spread truth to people.
Sonia Sanchez
#89. The point is that for our ancestors, the universe was a picture; for modern physics it is a story.
C.S. Lewis
#90. We carry our ancestors in our names and sometimes we carry our ancestors through the sliding doors of emergency rooms and either way they are heavy, man, either way we can't escape.
Marie-Helene Bertino
#91. My father told us stories about our ancestors and about the city and how we should act. He told us that the four sins are wine, women, wealth, and wrath.
Ida Pruitt
#92. Scientists believe that the invention of clothing in Africa was a key factor in allowing our ancestors to migrate into colder climates and to spread across the globe.
Ziya Tong
#93. In the ritual of baptism, our ancestors acted out the bizarre truth of the Christian identity: We are people who stand totally exposed before evil and death and declare them powerless against love. There
Rachel Held Evans
#94. Our ancestors believed that they were not born complete. There was someone out there with a part of their heart and soul. When they found that person, then they were one. Having offspring was a gift that came from that union, but it wasn't the focus.
Eden Cole
#95. We know that genes shape human cultures and human societies: The DNA we inherited from our ancestors makes certain foods taste better, affects the way we care for children, influences what colors we find vibrant, and contributes to our love of socializing, among other examples.
Sam Kean
#96. Our most dismaying failure is in the use of our knowledge of what human beings need in the way of bodily and spiritual nourishment. And I suspect that some of the guesses made by our ancestors are partly responsible for the starved bodies and spirits we see everywhere.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#97. We all have genes that come from our ancestors that aren't used - they're not turned on. So we actually carry ancient genes with us. If you could figure out how to turn those on, you could resurrect ancient characteristics from our ancestors.
Jack Horner
#98. Eugene has to stop doing God's job. God is big enough to do his own job. If God will judge our father for choosing to follow the way of our ancestors, then let God do the judging, not Eugene.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#99. Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors - the dreams of our old men, given them in solemn hours of the night by the Great Spirit; and the visions of our sachems, and is written in the hearts of our people.
Chief Seattle
#100. Tradition! We scarcely know the word anymore. We are afraid to be either proud of our ancestors or ashamed of them. We scorn nobility in name and in fact. We cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, made in the image and likeness of George Washington.
Dorothy Day
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