Ancestry Quotes

I don't know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be.

Mules are always boasting that their ancestors were horses.

Unworthy offspring brag the most about their worthy descendants.

Is anyone simply by birth to be applauded or punished?

Do well and you will have no need for ancestors.

We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.

The sharp thorn often produces delicate roses.

A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbours.

Genealogy. An account of one's descent from an ancestor who did not particularly care to trace his own.

Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

Breed is stronger than pasture.

Clever father, clever daughter; clever mother, clever son.

Good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.

It is indeed a desirable thing to be well-descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors.

Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them.

But every Englishman loves a pedigree.

Hereditary honors are a noble and a splendid treasure to descendants.

My ancestors didn't come over on the Mayflower, but they were there to meet the boat.

No one is better born than another, unless they are born with better abilities and a more amiable disposition.

From our ancestors come our names from our virtues our honor.

I don't have to look up my family tree, because I know that I'm the sap.

Heredity is nothing, but stored environment.

Good breeding is the result of good sense, some good nature, and a little self-denial for the sake of others.

Stillness and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding.

Vulgar persons can't sit still, or at least must always work their limbs and features.

Those who boast of their descent, brag on what they owe to others.

He who boasts of his descent, praises the deed of another.

Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.

The kind of ancestors we have had is not as important as the kind of descendants our ancestors have.

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)

I believe that the essence of government lies with unceasing concern for the welfare and dignity and decency and innate integrity of life for every individual. I dont like to say this and wish I didnt have to add these words to make it clear but I willregardless of color, creed, ancestry, sex or age.

If your descent is from heroic sires, show in your life a remnant of their fires.

Nothing is so soothing to our self esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.

The scholar without good breeding is a nitpicker;

the philosopher a cynic; the soldier a brute and everyone else disagreeable.

I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule.

Every man is an omnibus in which his ancestors ride.

None of us can boast about the morality of our ancestors.

The record does not show that Adam and Eve were ever married.

We owe it to our ancestors to preserve entire those rights they have delivered to our care. We owe it to our posterity not to suffer their dearest inheritance to be destroyed.

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.

They talk about their Pilgrim blood, their birthright high and holy! a mountain-stream that ends in mud thinks is melancholy.

High birth is an accident, not a virtue.

The person who has nothing to brag about but their ancestors is like a potato;

the best part of them is underground.

There is a certain class of people who prefer to say that their fathers came down in the world through their own follies than to boast that they rose in the world through their own industry and talents. It is the same shabby-genteel sentiment, the same vanity of birth which makes men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels rather than elevated apes.

In church your grandsire cut his throat;

to do the job too long he tarried: he should have had my hearty vote to cut his throat before he married.

Our true ancestry is the emergent creativity of the universe.

Our forebears were the great inventors who 'learned' how to coalesce hydrogen and helium into stars, to form planets, to sustain life first from mineral nutrients in the sea and later to capture delicious photons, to exploit oxygen for energy rather than be exterminated by it, to diversify via sexual reproduction, to form social groups for greater security and protection of offspring. We are the beneficiaries (and, admittedly, also the victims) of this narrative of emergence. Our 'companions'

DNA ties us all together; we share ancestry with barracuda and bacteria and mushrooms, if you go far enough back.

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.

If we remind ourselves of the fact that every fifth American today rightly points and perhaps also with a certain degree of pride to his German ancestry or her German ancestry, we can safely say that we, indeed, share common roots.

I get anxious. That lovely Jewish guilt that comes with ancestry.

Some men by ancestry are only the shadow of a mighty name.

When you start about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth.

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.