1.
The behavior of an individual is determined not by his racial affiliation, but by the character of his ancestry and his cultural environment.
Franz Boas
2.
My forefathers didn't come over on the Mayflower, but they met the boat.
Will Rogers
3.
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.
Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux
4.
There is no more fascinating subject in which a person may become occupied than an examination into the history of his ancestry.
Archibald F. Bennett
5.
Pride thyself on what virtue thou hast, and not on thy parentage.
Saadi
6.
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.
W. S. Gilbert
9.
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?
Lynn Margulis
10.
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.
Hallie Flanagan
11.
A Nation... is a group of persons united by a common error about their ancestry, and a common dislike of their neighbors
Karl Deutsch
13.
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.
Benvenuto Cellini
14.
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.
Edmund Burke
15.
The sharp thorn often produces delicate roses.
Ovid
18.
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.
John Frederick Boyes
19.
It is worthwhile for anyone to have behind him a few generations of honest, hard-working ancestry.
John Phillips
21.
Pedigrees seldom improve by age; the grandson is too often a weak infringement on the grandsire's parent.
Josh Billings
22.
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.
Clifford D. Simak
24.
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.
Daniel Defoe
25.
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
26.
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.
Jeff Hawkins
27.
Some decent regulated pre-eminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth, is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolite.
Edmund Burke
28.
It has been estimated that one third of our Western civilization bears the mark of its Jewish ancestry.
Huston Smith
29.
The egg it is the source of all To everyone's ancestral hall.
Clarence Day
30.
It is disgraceful when the passers-by exclaim,
"O ancient house! alas,
how unlike is thy present master to thy former one.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
31.
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.
Pierre Charron
34.
Few sons attain the praise Of their great sires and most their sires disgrace.
Homer
35.
Pedigree and ancestry and what we ourselves have not achieved, I scarcely recognize as our own.
Ovid
36.
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.
Elliott Sober
37.
It is indeed a desirable thing to be well-descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors.
Plutarch
39.
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.
Joseph Addison
40.
Birth and ancestry, and that which we have not ourselves achieved, we can scarcely call our own.
Ovid
42.
We are all creatures of our ancestry! There is no right and wrong, objectively.
Piers Anthony
44.
Maybe if I go far enough back into my ancestry, I have African roots or something. I've got no idea
Mick Taylor
45.
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.
Charles Caleb Colton
47.
What is birth to a man if it shall be a stain to his dead ancestors to have left such an offspring?
Philip Sidney
48.
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.
Spencer Wells
49.
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.
Hosea Ballou
50.
The theory of evolution explains to us what our ancestry has been. It does not explain away our worth. Why should we be afraid to learn more about what we are?
Philip Kitcher