Quotes about Ancestry

History remembers only the celebrated, genealogy remembers them all.

Every social trait labelled masculine or feminine is in truth a human trait. It is our human right to develop and contribute our talents whatever our race, sex, religion, ancestry, age. Human rights are indivisible!

A nation is a society united by delusions about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbors.

I will not cede more power to the state. I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power, as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arived at yesterday at the voting booth. That is a program of sorts, is it not? It is certainly program enough to keep conservatives busy, and Liberals at bay. And the nation free.

Whoever serves his country well has no need of ancestors.

The first who was king was a fortunate soldier: Who serves his country well has no need of ancestors.

Misers make wonderful ancestors.

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

I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. Consequently, my family pride is something inconceivable. I can't help it. I was born sneering.

About his father: Devoted to the tradition of his ancestors -Maiorum consuetudini deditus

The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men.

America is a construction of mind, not of race or inherited class or ancestral territory.

Our ancestors are very good kind of folks; but they are the last people I should choose to have a visiting acquaintance with.

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

Man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

A man finds room in the few square inches of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.

The hero's will is not that of his ancestors nor of his society, but his own. This will to be oneself is heroism.

Therefore, though we have rightly applauded our ancestors for their spiritual achievements (and do not and must not discount them now), those of us who prevail today will have done no small thing. The special spirits who have been reserved to live in this time of challenges and who overcome will one day be praised for their stamina by those who pulled handcarts. Those who were righteous in other ages, when the gospel light was snuffed out, will one day commend the current members of the Church who so live that the gospel light increased in its incandescence. Those of ancient Israel who saw many signs and yet episodically relapsed will one day praise those in this dispensation who have believed "because of the word" without being compelled to be humble. (Alma 32:14.) The Lamanites who were righteous in earlier times, especially, will praise their present posterity whose righteousness is bringing a blossoming of their seed. Thus the contemporary righteous will earn the esteem of their admired predecessors. Finally, if we are faithful, even the righteous of the city of Enoch will fall upon our necks and kiss us, and we will mingle our tears with their tears! (Moses 7:63.) Let us, therefore, notwithstanding our weaknesses, be reassured that the everyday keeping of the commandments and the doing of our duties is what it is all about.

We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all; we don't know its history, and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity. We merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it, as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise.

My first American ancestor, gentlemen, was an Indian-an early Indian. Your ancestors skinned him alive, and I am an orphan. All those Salem witches were ancestors of mine. Your people made it tropical for them. . . . The first slave brought into New England out of Africa was an ancestor of mine-for I am a mixed breed, an infinitely shaded and exquisite Mongrel.

The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.

Those who foolishly pride themselves on their nobility mistake that which makes them noble, for it is only the virtue of their ancestors that gives them noble blood.

Title and ancestry render a good man more illustrious, but an ill one more contemptible.

Where eldest Night And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold Eternal anarchy amidst the noise Of endless wars, and by confusion stand; For hot, cold, moist, and dry, four champions fierce, Strive here for mast'ry.

Set before us the conduct of our own British ancestors, who defended for us the inherent rights of mankind against foreign and domestic tyrants and usurpers, against arbitrary kings and cruel priests; in short against the gates of earth and hell.

Sir William Blackstone, the great English jurist, writing in his Commentaries on the Laws of England in 1769, was most explicit in emphasizing the weakness of man's nature. As he observed: ". . . if our reason were always, as in our first ancestor before his transgression, clear and perfect,unruffled by passions, unclouded by prejudice, unimpaired by disease or intemperance, the task would be pleasant and easy; we should need no other guide but this. But every man now finds the contrary in his own experience; that his reason is corrupt, and his understanding full of ignorance and error. This has given manifold occasion for the benign interposition of divine Providence, which in compassion to the frailty, the imperfection, and the blindness of human reason, hath been pleased at sundry times and in divers manners, to discover and enforce its laws by an immediate and direct revelation. The doctrines thus delivered we call the revealed or divine law . . ."

He's happy who, far away from business, like the races of men of old, tills his ancestral fields with his own oxen, unbound by any interest to pay.

Maecenas, born of monarch ancestors -Maecenas atavis edite regibus