90 Forebears Quotes

Following is our list of forebears quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about forefathers.

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Famous Forebears Quotes

Let us be the ancestors our descendants will thank. - Winona LaDuke

Let us be the ancestors our descendants will thank. — Winona LaDuke

We must strive to become good ancestors. — Ralph Nader

They who derive their worth from their ancestors resemble potatoes, the most valuable part of which is underground. — Francis Bacon

Let us listen to the voices of our Forebears ... In the smoky cabin, souls that wish us well are murmuring. — Leopold Sedar Senghor

So, as you go into battle, remember your ancestors and remember your descendants. — Tacitus

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

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

You have the same DNA as the greats of the past who started revivals. — Lou Engle

Do well and you will have no need for ancestors. — Voltaire

Walk like you have 4000 ancestors behind you. — Sahil Bloom

The wise man must remember that while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future. — Herbert Spencer

Some of my ancestors were religious dissenters who came to America over three hundred years ago. Others were abolitionists in New England in the eighteen forties and fifties. — Pete Seeger

Noble fathers have noble children. — Euripides

Your great great grandfather lived most of his life without running water or electricity, and he was probably more racist than you are. You’ve never met him, but without him, you wouldn’t exist. — Tim Urban

My forefathers didn't come over on the Mayflower, but they met the boat. — Will Rogers

Forbear Quotes

There are three signs of a knowledgeable person: knowledge, forbearance and silence. — Ali ibn Abi Talib

Now may the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the eternal high priest himself, the Son of God Jesus Christ, build you up in faith and truth and in all gentleness and in all freedom from anger and forbearance and steadfastness and patient endurance and purity. — Polycarp

My son, forbearance is a great virtue; there's no other like it. - Sarada Devi

My son, forbearance is a great virtue; there's no other like it. — Sarada Devi

When ambitious desires arise in thy heart, recall the days of extremity thou have passed through. Forbearance is the root of all quietness and assurance forever. — Ieyasu Tokugawa

Patience is a conquering virtue. The learned say that, if it not desert you, It vanquishes what force can never reach; Why answer back at every angry speech? No, learn forbearance or, I'll tell you what, You will be taught it, whether you will or not. — Geoffrey Chaucer

Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all. — William Shakespeare

Tolerance, a term which we sometimes use in place of the words respect, mercy, generosity, or forbearance, is the most essential element of moral systems; it is a very important source of spiritual discipline and a celestial virtue of perfected people. — Fethullah Gulen

Forbearance is the root of quietness and assurance forever. — Ieyasu Tokugawa

Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind, spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies. — Robert Louis Stevenson

The patience and forbearance of the poor are among the strongest bulwarks of the rich. — C. L. R. James

Forefathers Quotes

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. — Thomas Jefferson

There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters — Daniel Webster

The Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms. — Samuel Adams

All might be free if they valued freedom, and defended it as they should. — Samuel Adams

I am opposed to any form of tyranny over the mind of man. — Thomas Jefferson

The development of Africa will not happen without the effective participation of women. Our forefathers' image of women must be buried once for all. — Ousmane Sembene

Because I was in Atlanta, people didn't realize I'm one of the real forefathers in the game. — Jermaine Dupri

What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived. — Moshe Dayan

Our forefathers made one mistake. What they should have fought for was representation without taxation. — Fletcher Knebel

Liberty, once lost, is lost forever. — John Adams

Forerunner Quotes

Complacency is the forerunner of mediocrity. You can never work too hard on attitudes, effort and technique. — Don Meyer

You need to have extraordinary wisdom to be the forerunner. — Ma Huateng

As to your Newton, I confess I do not understand his void and his gravity; I admit he has demonstrated the movement of the heavenly bodies with more exactitude than his forerunners; but you will admit it is an absurdity to to maintain the existence of Nothing. — Frederick the Great

In some of the middle colonies the towns and counties were both active and had a relation with each other which was the forerunner of the present system of local government in the Western States. — Albert Bushnell Hart

Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror. — Carlos Fuentes

The odious and disgusting aristocracy of wealth is built upon the ruins of all that is good in chivalry or republicanism; and luxury is the forerunner of a barbarism scarcely capable of cure. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Attitudes are the forerunners of conditions. — Eric Butterworth

Newton advanced, with one gigantic stride, from the regions of twilight into the noon day of science. A Boyle and a Hooke, who would otherwise have been deservedly the boast of their century, served but as obscure forerunners of Newton's glories. — Thomas Young

Real knowledge never promoted either turbulence or unbelief; but its progress is the forerunner of liberality and enlightened toleration. — Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux

SORCERY, n. The ancient prototype and forerunner of political influence. It was, however, deemed less respectable and sometimes was punished by torture and death. — Ambrose Bierce

People Writing About Forebears

Name Quotes Likes
Read quotes by Winona LaDuke

Winona LaDuke
quotes on education, climate change and slavery

36 764
Read quotes by Ralph Nader

Ralph Nader
quotes on leadership

186 1394
Read quotes by Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon
quotes on love, reading and books

675 3805
Read quotes by Tacitus

Tacitus
quotes on nero, agrippina younger and tiberius

220 1865
Read quotes by Plato

Plato
quotes on life, love and reality

945 13426
Read quotes by Lou Engle

Lou Engle
quotes on leadership, faith and prayer

17 457

More Forebears Quotes

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

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

The war... was an unnecessary condition of affairs, and might have been avoided if forebearance and wisdom had been practiced on both sides. — Robert E. Lee

The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. — John F. Kennedy

For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe -- the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God. — John F. Kennedy

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

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

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

The fact that boys are allowed to exist at all is evidence of a remarkable Christian forebearance among men. — Ambrose Bierce

Today certain definite ideas are developing out of the Egyptian ideas. What is called Darwinism today did not arise because of external reasons. We are the same souls who, in Egypt, received the pictures of the animal forms of man's forebears. The old views have awakened again, but man has descended more deeply into the material world. — Rudolf Steiner

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

He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebearers, but by diligent hard work, he overcame them. — James Reston, Jr.

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

I thought, He must forebear to reveal His power and glory by presenting Himself as Himself, and must be present only in the ordinary miracle of the existence of His creatures. Those who wish to see Him must see Him in the poor, the hungry, the hurt, the wordless creatures, the groaning and travailing beautiful world. — Wendell Berry

In the last quarter of the 20th century, Britons have been understandably obsessed with the problem of having too little power in the world. In the third quarter of the 18th century, by contrast, their forebears were perplexed by the problem of having acquired too much power too quickly over too many people. — Linda Colley

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

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

From time to time there appear on the face of the earth men of rare and consummate excellence, who dazzle us by their virtue, and whose outstanding qualities shed a stupendous light. Like those extraordinary stars of whose origins we are ignorant, and of whose fate, once they have vanished, we know even less, such men have neither forebears nor descendants: they are the whole of their race. — Jean De La Bruyere

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' — John Brewer

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

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

The telephone is the greatest single enemy of scholarship; for what our intellectual forebears used to inscribe in ink now goes once over a wire into permanent oblivion. — Stephen Jay Gould

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

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

My parents sent me to a school across town, an integrated school, where I had the chance to meet and grow up with people who were from other parts of the world. ... I remember feeling that I would never have anything to contribute on St. Patrick's Day. I couldn't tell the stories that they might have been telling about their forebears and I felt left out. — Isabel Wilkerson

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

Something extraordinary is happening. Do you sense it? Truly, as obedience and morality decline in the world, the Lord is sending more exceptional spirits to earth. As a body they excel the average capacity of their forebears. Their potential for personal growth and positive contribution is enormous. — Richard G. Scott

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

Now, the engineers and managers believe with all their hearts the glorious things their forebears hired people to say about them. Yesterday's snow job becomes today's sermon. — Kurt Vonnegut

The end of all stories, even if the writer forebears to mention it, is death, which is where time stops short. Sheherezade knew this, which is why she kept on spinning another story out of the bowels of the last one, never coming to a point where she could say: "This is the end." Because it would have been. — Angela Carter

Genealogy: A perverse preoccupation of those who seek to demonstrate that their forebears were better people than they are. — Sydney J. Harris

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

Considersing the forebearance of a person, Do not harass him. — Chanakya

Our forebears are deserving of tribute for one indisputable reason, if for no other: without them we should not be here. Let us recognize that we are not the ultimate triumph but rather we are beads on a string. Let us behave with decency to the beads that were strung before us and hope modestly that the beads that come after us will not hold us of no account simply because we are dead. — Robertson Davies

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

Riches should come as the reward for hard work, preferably by one's forebears — Steven Runciman

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

Whenever I give a talk about my work I am invariably asked who my influences are. Not what my influences are, but who.. As if the gutter, misunderstandings, memories, sex, dreams, and books matter less than forebears do. After all, in terms of influences, it is as much the guy who mugged me on Tenth Street, or my beloved dog who passed away much too early, as it was Giotto or Diane Arbus. — Robert Gober

Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the ego, lessens the friction of social contacts. . . . It is only in lies, wholeheartedly and bravely told, that human nature attains through words and speech the forebearance, the nobility, the romance, the idealism, that-being what it is-it falls so short of in fact and in deed. — Clare Boothe Luce

You may even have Jews in your midst who did not learn their way of life from us, and did not inherit it from a Jewish forebear. We may have authentic gentiles in our midst: these single protests are of no account; they are extreme and irrelevant variations. — Maurice Samuel

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

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

Where hunters and woodcutters once slept in their boots by the dying light of their thousand fires and went on, old teutonic forebears with eyes incandesced by the visionary light of a massive rapacity, wave on wave of the violent and the insane, their brains stoked with spoorless analogues of all that was, lean aryans with their abrogate Semitic chapbook reenacting the dramas and parable therein. — Cormac McCarthy

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

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