Quotes About Heritage

My wife Hillary sometimes accuses me of trying to reinvent the 19th century. In some ways she's right because I like things that I can understand and that aren't too complicated.

Picasso is a character that has pursued me for a long time and I always rejected. He deserves a lot of respect because I am from Malaga, and I was born four blocks from where he was born.

As I grow older, it's getting more and more important to me. I'm becoming conscious and learning to celebrate where I'm from and my roots. I think I rejected it to an extent when I was young, because it was different, and you want to fit in and look like other kids.

I relate to both my Caucasian side and my African side, and I love that.

If you talk about language in the Caribbean, you must relate it to history.

My mom is African-American, Native-American, Irish, and Creole, and my father is of Jewish, Russian, and Polish descent. It's made me who I am. Because of my diverse background, I think I can relate to many different people, different stories, and different communities.

When you become an actor, at some point you look for something that brings you back to your roots. You find something that people around your neighborhood can relate to. People that you're close with can relate to.

I'm very proudly European. I love that we have stories to tell of a place where we come from and we can relate to.

My mother was related to four of Jamaica's oldest families, and to say merely that she was out of the top drawer would not convey the quality of her breeding.

My parents didn't have a lot of money when I was growing up. We were comfortable, but I didn't go to Oxbridge, and yet every American interviewer I get says to me, 'You're related to Charles II! Your grandfather was a baronet!' And it's infuriating, because that is a part of my history, but you're trying to turn me into a posh boy, and I'm not.

If you're going to be related to someone it might as well be Dickens.

Not many Rabbitts in this country are related to me.

Everybody in my family who had a job worked in the auto industry or something related to it.

If you share a common ancestor with somebody, you're related to them. It doesn't mean that you're going to invite them to the family reunion, but it means that you share DNA.

As I don't know what life would be like without my Chaplin connections, I work with them. I'm just really happy it's a family I can be proud of; it's not as if I'm related to some Z-list celebrity.

Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related.

If you share a common ancestor with somebody, you're related to them. It doesn't mean that you're going to invite them to the family reunion, but it means that you share DNA. I think it's fascinating.

I'm 100% Celt. In fact, I'm directly related to the progenitor of the high kings of Ireland, Niall of the Nine Hostages.

I'm related to Davy Crockett on my mom's side. Honest.

The Uighurs are a Turkic people more closely related to Uzbeks and Kazakhs than to Chinese.

The mechanical and social achievements of our day must not blind our eyes to the fact that, in all that relates to man, his nature and aspirations, we have added little or nothing to what has been so finely said by the great men of old.

I think all in all, one thing a lot of plays seem to be saying is that we need to, as black Americans, to make a connection with our past in order to determine the kind of future we're going to have. In other words, we simply need to know who we are in relation to our historical presence in America.

I feel partly American, but I have an ambiguous relation with both America and India, the only two countries I really know. I never feel fully one way or the other.

I'm extremely proud of my relations and my heritage and my family. That's one side of my life, and my work is the other side of my life, and... I've always tried to keep them, you know apart.