Ancestry Quotes

The behavior of an individual is determined not by his racial affiliation, but by the character of his ancestry and his cultural environment.

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

Though you be sprung in direct line from Hercules, if you show a lowborn meanness, that long succession of ancestors whom you disgrace are so many witnesses against you; and this grand display of their tarnished glory but serves to make your ignominy more evident.

There is no more fascinating subject in which a person may become occupied than an examination into the history of his ancestry.

Pride thyself on what virtue thou hast, and not on thy parentage.

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.

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

A mule has neither pride of ancestry nor hope of posterity.

All scientists agree that evolution has occurred-that all life comes from a common ancestry, that there has been extinction, and that new taxa, new biological groups, have arisen. The question is, is natural selection enough to explain evolution? Is it the driver of evolution?

The theater, when it is potent enough to deserve its ancestry, is always dangerous; that is why it is instinctively feared by people who do not want change, but only preservation of the status quo.

Heredity is nothing but stored environment.

There are many kinds of conceit, but the chief one is to let people know what a very ancient and gifted family one descends from.

A Nation... is a group of persons united by a common error about their ancestry, and a common dislike of their neighbors

The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends most to the perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice. The possession of family wealth and of the distinction which attends hereditary possessions (as most concerned in it,) are the natural securities for this transmission.

The sharp thorn often produces delicate roses.

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

By ancestry, I was born to rule.

Nobility of birth is like a cipher; it has no power in itself, like wealth or talent; but, it tells with all the power of a cipher when added to either of the other two.

It is worthwhile for anyone to have behind him a few generations of honest, hard-working ancestry.

Born in a cellar, and living in a garret.

Pedigrees seldom improve by age; the grandson is too often a weak infringement on the grandsire's parent.

Some decent regulated pre-eminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth, is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolite.

It has been estimated that one third of our Western civilization bears the mark of its Jewish ancestry.

The egg it is the source of all To everyone's ancestral hall.

It is disgraceful when the passers-by exclaim,
"O ancient house! alas,
how unlike is thy present master to thy former one.

Those who have nothing else to recommend them to the respect of others but only their blood, cry it up at a great rate, and have their mouth perpetually full of it. They swell and vapor, and you are sure to hear of their families and relations every third word.

Every man is an omnibus in which his ancestors ride.

Breed is stronger than pasture.

Few sons attain the praise Of their great sires and most their sires disgrace.

Pedigree and ancestry and what we ourselves have not achieved, I scarcely recognize as our own.

Current organisms have a higher probability of sharing a single code if the common ancestry hypothesis is true than they'd have if the hypothesis of separate ancestry were true. That is, the simpler hypothesis has the higher likelihood in the technical sense of "likelihood" used in statistics.

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

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

In the founders of great families, titles or attributes of honor are generally correspondent with the virtues of the person to whom they are applied; but in their descendants they are too often the marks rather of grandeur than of merit. The stamp and denomination still continue, but the intrinsic value is frequently lost.

Birth and ancestry, and that which we have not ourselves achieved, we can scarcely call our own.

When real nobleness accompanies that imaginary one of birth, the imaginary seems to mix with real, and becomes real too.

We are all creatures of our ancestry! There is no right and wrong, objectively.

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

Maybe if I go far enough back into my ancestry, I have African roots or something. I've got no idea

It is with antiquity as with ancestry, nations are proud of the one, and individuals of the other; but if they are nothing in themselves, that which is their pride ought to be their humiliation.

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

What is birth to a man if it shall be a stain to his dead ancestors to have left such an offspring?

So what we can answer [as geneticists] is questions about biology, about biological ancestry. But to make any sense of that historically we have to contextualize it - the archaeology, the linguistic pattern, even the climatology.

It is better to be the builder of our own name than to be indebted by descent for the proudest gifts known to the books of heraldry.

If the means were available, we could trace our ancestry - yours and mine - back to the first blob of life-like material that came into being on the planet.

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

We are very fond of some families because they can be traced beyond the Conquest, whereas indeed the farther back, the worse, as being the nearer allied to a race of robbers and thieves.

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

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.

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