Top 100 Quotes About The 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. 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
#3. {In the shadows where the ancestors sleep, the bird's song is young, but all else is old. Stillness surrounds me and I breathe softly expecting the unexpected.} from book in progress
Nancy B. Brewer
#4. 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
#5. A bit of mist and light suffice for life to overpower nothingness. A bit of hope and time suffice for you to cross the mountain trails of myth; you were spared the fate of your ancestors. So borrow the wisdom of the anemones and say: Nothingness does not concern me, even if death besieges me.
Mahmoud Darwish
#6. The secret to good health is to behave like your ancestors did before the Industrial Revolution.
Steven Magee
#7. Generational change within a genre is hard to parse while it's happening. Only in retrospect can the passing of the baton from ancestors to progeny be clearly discerned.
Paul Di Filippo
#8. 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
#9. A friend of ours has a hobby doing genealogy, and we found out that we were cousins in the ninth degree, that we had a common ancestor on the Mayflower.
Marion Zimmer Bradley
#10. 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
#11. The songs of our ancestors are also the songs of our children
Philip Carr-Gomm
#12. I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#13. Our ancestors always thought of the worst thing that could happen, and that's why we're alive.
Fiona Apple
#14. 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
#15. 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
#17. There is more difference between a zebra and a horse, or between a dolphin and a porpoise, than there is between you and the furry creatures your distant ancestors left behind when they set out to take over the world.
Bill Bryson
#18. I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge.
William Gaddis
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. In arguing that machines think, we are in the same fix as Darwin when he argued that man shares common ancestors with monkeys, or Galileo when he argued that the Earth spins on its axis.
Herbert A. Simon
#22. 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
#23. After a hard day in the fields, his men would strip naked and plunge into the bitterly cold loch, he among them. Even at eighteen, he could see his ancestors had bequeathed him more than a castle.
Eloisa James
#24. I miss the days of burning your kind at the stake. For generations we have settled for financial ruin and ostracization of your whorish ancestors - but know this, I will personally gut you and put your head on a pike in my parlor.
Heather McVea
#25. 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
#26. To the dismay of anti-Semites, the Jews were never a foreign "ethnos" of invaders from afar but rather an autochthonous population whose ancestors, for the most part, converted to Judaism before the arrival of Christianity or Islam.17
Shlomo Sand
#28. We are connected, like it or not, to the ancestors of our biological families, and their templates
Robert Moss
#29. OUR history begins before we are born. We represent the hereditary influences of our race, and our ancestors virtually live in us.
James Nasmyth
#30. 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
#31. My father is 100% Japanese and came to the United States when he was only 18 years old. My grandmother still resides in Japan, which has allowed me to travel to the roots of my ancestors with my father.
Apolo Ohno
#32. 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
#33. We need to haunt the house of history and listen anew to the ancestors' wisdom.
Maya Angelou
#34. If we presume that the boundary of the universe is a kind of surrounding wall,
then we think like ancestors who thought there's abyss at the edge of flat earth.
Toba Beta
#35. 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
#36. The rhyme pad was a spell book - it summoned asphalt elementals, elder gods, and weeping ancestors, all of whom had your back.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#37. 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
#38. Blessed with riches and possibilities far beyond anything imagined by ancestors who tilled the unpredictable soil of medieval Europe, modern populations have nonetheless shown a remarkable capacity to feel that neither who they are nor what they have is quite enough.
Alain De Botton
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. The old fire pit was ancient. I couldn't say how many of my ancestors warmed themselves at this outdoor hearth. Sitting around it was rather affecting, especially when you thought about the countless people who had occupied your very spot in some distant past. It was kind of surreal.
J.M. Northup
#43. The economic pie of 2014 is far larger than the pie of 1500, but it is distributed so unevenly that many African peasants and Indonesian labourers return home after a hard day's work with less food than did their ancestors 500 years ago.
Yuval Noah Harari
#44. Latinos have fought in all of America's wars, beginning with the Revolutionary War. Many Latinos are fighting and dying for our country today in Iraq, just as several of their ancestors fought for freedom in Mexico over a century ago.
Joe Baca
#45. It is certainly desirable to be well descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors.
Plutarch
#46. My ancestors include Monahwee, who was one of the leaders in the Red Stick War, which was the largest Indian uprising in history, and Osceola, who refused to sign a treaty with the United States.
Joy Harjo
#47. Oh, no-" They weren't even on the runway, and Jonah's father was already immersed in his BlackBerry. "Remember those 'Live Large with the Wiz Generation' posters? Well, guess how that translates into Chinese- 'Jonah Wizard Makes Your Ancestors Fat'.
Gordon Korman
#48. Lima beans, watermelons, potatoes, eggplants, and cabbages are among the many other familiar crops whose wild ancestors were bitter or poisonous, and
Jared Diamond
#49. It's important to remember that we evolved. Now, I know that's a dirty word for some people, but we evolved from common ancestors with the gorillas, the chimpanzee and also the bonobos. We have a common past, and we have a common future.
Louise Leakey
#50. You are not doomed to reproduce what your ancestors have done. The son will not be like his father, the daughter will not be like her mother. She can invent something new. I think that is the best message of modernity.
Pascal Bruckner
#51. Blues for me is having things not go your way - life, love, job, money, ... It is not about the oppression of my ancestors, who were trying to get back at the overseers. Blues is different for my generation.
Robert Cray
#52. It was Paxton Osgood, wearing a cute pink dress and gorgeous shoes. She was tall like her brother, but had wide curves, as if one of her angular French ancestors had scandalized everyone by marrying a pretty stout milkmaid, and several generations later, Paxton was the result.
Sarah Addison Allen
#53. Ritual affirms the common patterns, the values, the shared joys, risks, sorrows, and changes that bind a community together. Ritual links together our ancestors and descendants, those who went before with those will come after us.
Starhawk
#54. I'm a 10th-generation Texan. My ancestor - Andrew Kent - fought at the Alamo.
Jessica Collins
#55. Searching for alternative life on Earth might seem misconceived, because there is excellent evidence that every kind of life so far studied evolved from a common ancestor that lived billions of years ago. Yet most of the life that exists on Earth has never been properly classified.
Paul Davies
#56. There is a need in every generation to study the past, to absorb its spirit, to preserve its messages ... it's a collaboration of ourselves and our ancestors, the result is a deeper understanding for individuals and in consequence, a broader culture for the nation.
Christopher Tunnard
#57. Our rural ancestors, with little blest,
Patient of labor when the end was rest,
Indulged the day that housed their annual grain,
With feasts, and off'rings, and a thankful strain.
Alexander Pope
#58. The beginning of all pain and suffering in the world started with one act of disobedience. Christian and non-Christian alike have inherited the consequences from our common ancestors, Adam and Eve - our polluted environment and flawed human nature.
Billy Graham
#59. I find my husband's family history fascinating, as they can trace the family lineage back to ancestors who fought, and died, in the first battle of the Revolution, as well as to many other interesting people.
Kim Edwards
#60. Now they [the Powers] have started the aggression, and the extinction of our nation is imminent. If we just fold our arms and yield to them, I would have no face to see our ancestors after death. If we must perish, why not fight to the death?
Empress Dowager Cixi
#61. Christianity doesn't demand that we worship our ancestors. If we don't remember our ancestors, then, in all likelihood, we cannot also recall the distant past.
F. Sionil Jose
#62. Jesus is an example. We have other examples, including many of our ancestors as role models who understood the inner meaning of our orientation.
Malcolm Boyd
#63. We are bipedal apes, and it should not be surprising to see that fact reflected in the way our ancestors lived.
Richard Leakey
#64. I mean, in the history of poetry there have been a lot poetries where you have to inherit the position of poet from your ancestors and I think that if you just leave anyone to become a poet based on an aristocratic society, then a lot of people are left out who might have something to offer.
Edward Hirsch
#65. like all other living creatures, I am the descendant of survivors, so the fear in my head is the voice of my ancestors whispering their accumulated wisdom.
David George Haskell
#66. Our ancestors are very good kind of folks; but they are the last people I should choose to have a visiting acquaintance with.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
#67. People who take no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything worthy to be remembered with pride by remote descendants.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Don't eat anything your great-great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. There are a great many food-like items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn't recognize as food.. stay away from these
Michael Pollan
#72. 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
#73. I've run the marathon several times, so I definitely don't look like the Great Ancestor!
George Takei
#74. In every instance I noted that a people's prosperity or misery lay in direct proportion to its freedom or its inhibitions and, along the same lines, of the sacrifice or selfishness of its ancestors.
Jose Rizal
#75. 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
#76. For over two billion years, through the apparent fancy of her endless differentiations and metamorphosis the Cell, as regards its basic physiological mechanisms, has remained one and the same. It is life itself, and our true and distant ancestor.
Albert Claude
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. No stigma attaches to the love of money in America, and provided it does not exceed the bounds imposed by public order, it is held in honor. The American will describe as noble and estimable ambition that our medieval ancestors would have called base cupidity.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#80. Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians.
Mohsin Hamid
#81. 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
#82. There's a rich legend of this in other cultures, this speaking with ancestors. The Christian mystics communicated with angels.
James Redfield
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. As time passes, people, even of the South, will begin to wonder how it was possible that their ancestors ever fought for or justified institutions which acknowledged the right of property in man.
Ulysses S. Grant
#86. Just because I don't believe in YOUR God doesn't mean I don't believe in God. I just choose not to be bound by the limits of your imagination or those of your ancestors.
Steve Maraboli
#87. I had a lot of hatred, but I realized that kind of hate didn't do much. I had to start fueling myself with pride. We owe the ancestors that. So many of the souls who died in bondage just want us to recognize their struggle.
Marilyn Nelson
#88. Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.
Edward Dahlberg
#89. Sister?" Jessie Kay scowled. "Do I really look like his sister? I clearly come from grade-A stock while his ancestors made a few poor choices along the way.
Gena Showalter
#90. I have not tolerated an atheist in the ranks of the SS. Every member has a deep faith in God, in what my ancestors called in their language Waralda, the ancient one, the one who is mightier than we are.
Heinrich Himmler
#91. Upshaw - Apsaroke, 1905. Curtis's friend and interpreter Alexander Upshaw, "perfectly educated and absolutely uncivilized," as Curtis said of him, had trouble shuttling between two worlds. He chose to pose in the clothes of his ancestors.
Timothy Egan
#92. Since Serengeti-scale savanna scenes are only one or two million years old, our earliest after-the-apes ancestors didn't move into this scene so much as they evolved with it, as the slower climate changes and uplift produced more grass and less forest.
William H. Calvin
#93. ... walk in the footprints of his ancestors. This land is a museum of man's ancient history. The American has gone to the moon and found dust, he's going farther away to look for other planets, very good. But know thyself first. That is what I would tell my American friend.
Tsegaye Gebre Medhin
#94. From the point where our ancestors started making tools, people have been unable to survive without the things they make; in this sense, it is making things that makes us human.
Neil MacGregor
#95. 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
#96. Books can be the people we never get to meet, ancestors or far neighbors.
Elizabeth Knox
#97. Despite her light skin, despite the obviousness that more of her ancestors had owned slaves than had been them, how could she lose? We're open like that. We like to know that people love us; we don't care how they look.
Tiphanie Yanique
#98. And everyone who teaches about slavery knows a little dirty secret that reveals historians' collective failure: many African-American students struggle with a sense of shame that most of their ancestors could not escape the suffering they experienced.
Edward E. Baptist
#99. My uncle" is the natives' usual name for the tiger, they believing that the soul of each of their ancestors is lodged for eternity in the body of some member of the cat tribe.
Jules Verne
#100. To strive for the common prosperity and happiness of all nations, as well as the security and wellbeing of our subjects, is the solemn obligation which has been handed down by our imperial ancestors and which lies close to our heart,
Hirohito
