Quotes About Heritage

I'm sure almost no one deludes themselves that all their ancestors were decent. Pick a vein, any vein: mud mixed with lightning flows through, an unruly fusion of bad blood and good.

and a sense of being part of something bigger than yourself, like religion, or just being Danish for folk round these parts.

We are walking archives of ancestral wisdom.

Anachronism' implies something long dead, and nothing is dead here. History, as they say, is alive and living in London.

Not all of us have that luxury, of a past. My history doesn't offer me much in that respect.

Nietzsche, in cursing our age, sees in it the heritage of the Gospel, while Dostoevsky, cursing it just as vigorously, sees in it the result of a denial of the Gospel

Like their ancestors, Louise and her parents klutzed away their days.

Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us.

Sometimes the greatest kindness we could receive would be to have someone expect more from us than we do, because they see more clearly our divine heritage.

An old farm is always more than the people under its roof. It is the past as well as the present, and vanished generations have built themselves into it as well as left their footsteps in the worn woodwork of the stair.

Sir Henry fixed him with a keen eye. 'Odd name, Tom Skatt - eh?' 'Thats right' 'You don't think we could be related?' Tom looked up at his great-great-great-uncle and smiled. 'I don't think so' 'No,' grinned Sir Henry "no, of course not

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

One of my illustrious predecessors.

Oh, the roast beef of England,And old England's roast beef!

My whole damn family was nice. I don't think I've imagined it. It's true. Maybe it has to do with being brought up as Christian Scientists. Half of my relatives were Readers or Practitioners in the church.

Home is one's birthplace, ratified by memory.

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.

My mom, God rest her soul - she liked nicknames. In the womb she named me Skip. There was another black guy in Piedmont, W.Va., and his name was Skip. They called him Big Skip, and I was Little Skip.

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.

So when you do your family tree and Margaret Cho does hers, and... Wanda Sykes and John Legend... we're adding to the database that scholars can then draw from to generalize about the complexity of the American experience. And that's the contribution that family trees make to broader scholarship.

There are just so many stories that are buried on family trees.

You can say I had a severe case of 'Roots' envy. I wanted to be like Alex Haley, and I wanted to be able to... do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage, as I like to put it, and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa.

The African American's relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent, at least since the early nineteenth century, when 3 000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa.