Best 137 quotes in «ancestry quotes» category

People who are ashamed of their heritage cannot be trusted.

Some of us are given more time on this Earth than others, but none of us should ever take the gift of life for granted. If we strive to be the best we can be, committing ourselves to what is right and true, while helping others along the way, then we will leave our own story worth the telling and be a shining example for our children and our grandchildren and all those great, great, great, great grandchildren in those far off times to come.

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)

The family trees of all of us, of whatever origin or trait, must meet and merge into one genetic tree of all humanity by the time they have spread into our ancestries for about 50 generations.

The fountain of youth resides in our memory. You will never outlive your shadow.

There's a certain amount of ambiguity in my background, what with intermarriages and conversions, but under various readings of three codes which I don’t much respect (Mosaic Law, the Nuremberg Laws, and the Israeli Law of Return) I do qualify as a member of the tribe, and any denial of that in my family has ceased with me. But I would not remove myself to Israel if it meant the continuing expropriation of another people, and if anti-Jewish fascism comes again to the Christian world—or more probably comes at us via the Muslim world—I already consider it an obligation to resist it wherever I live. I would detest myself if I fled from it in any direction. Leo Strauss was right. The Jews will not be 'saved' or 'redeemed.' (Cheer up: neither will anyone else.) They/we will always be in exile whether they are in the greater Jerusalem area or not, and this in some ways is as it should be. They are, or we are, as a friend of Victor Klemperer's once put it to him in a very dark time, condemned and privileged to be 'a seismic people.' A critical register of the general health of civilization is the status of 'the Jewish question.' No insurance policy has ever been devised that can or will cover this risk.

So a dog's value came from the training AND the breeding. And by breeding, Edgar supposed he meant both the bloodlines - the particular dogs in their ancestry - and all the information in the file cabinets. Because the files, with their photographs, measurements, notes, charts, cross-references, and scores, told the STORY of the dog - what a MEANT as his father put it.

Some of us can live without a society but not without a family.

To be American is to long for whatever our parents fled.

We can all receive the gifts of our unique ancestry and harness them to forge a path of joy and healing.

The precise ancestry of a black drug dealer or cop killer is irrelevant. His blackness predicts and explains his crime. He reinforces the racist presumption. It is only when that presumption is questioned that a fine analysis of ancestry is invoked. Frederick Douglass was an ordinary nigger while working the fields. But as a famed abolitionist, it was often said that his genius must derive from his white half.

We are all descendants of murderers and thieves.

We are free falling backward through time, reincarnating ourselves from our past, reflecting the chaotic energy of the present.

We do not brag about ancestors that were not great

We should feel empowered by where we came from and who we are, not hide it. It is important to acknowledge that everything we do affects our ancestors as much as they have affected us.

We are the accumulation of the dreams of generations

What did it mean, all this personal looking backward? What were people hoping to find? What bearing, really, did their ancestry have on who they were now?

When I opened the box, I had to remove myself from whose handwriting it was that I was reading and whose story I was hearing. I had to, or I never would have made it past the first letter. If I stopped to think about my Grandpa writing to my Grandma, knowing how much he loved her and how many years he spent without her after her death, I knew I wouldn’t be able to make it through just one letter without an onslaught of tears. And it was Grandpa, a voice I knew so well. One that I miss terribly.

You can take the Indian out of the family, but you cannot take the family out of the Indian.

Your ancestors are rooting for you.

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

We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.

When you trace your genealogy, you find connections to many of the people and events that shaped history. History is not the story of some old irrelevant strangers. No. History is your story. Your family was there - your grandmothers and grandfathers, uncles and aunts, cousins, nephews and nieces. If not for them, you wouldn't even be here.

You are so engrossed in the fact that you are oblivious to its environment

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?

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

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

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.

Breed is stronger than pasture.

Character is better than ancestry, and personal conduct is more important than the highest parentage.

Born in a cellar, and living in a garret.

Great families of yesterday we show, And lords, whose parents were the Lord knows who.

Both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.

Do well and you will have no need for ancestors.

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.

Darwin repeatedly used the hypothesis of common ancestry as a platform on which to build his various ideas about testing hypotheses concerning natural selection. He also argued that adaptive similarities provide little or no evidence for common ancestry. Although this second claim needs to be fine-tuned, Darwin was right that ample evidence for common ancestry can exist even if none of the characteristics we observe were caused to evolve by natural selection.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

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

High birth is a thing which I never knew any one to disparage except those who had it not; and I never knew any one to make a boast of it who had anything else to be proud of.

Good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.

High birth is an accident, not a virtue.

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.

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

I am one who finds within me a nobility that spurns the idle pratings of the great, and their mean boasts of what their fathers were, while they themselves are fools effeminate.

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.

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

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

For those of us who are fortunate to share an Irish ancestry, we take great pride in the contributions that Irish-Americans.

I didn't know much about my Native American ancestry, but as I got older I became more interested in it.

I do have a muse. I am not sure how to describe her. She can be very elusive. She was born in England but has Mediterranean ancestry.