Quotes About Ancestry

Things that happen before you are born still affect you and people who come before your time affect you as well.

While the rest of the species is descended from apes, redheads are descended from cats.

To all intents and purposes Roxy was as white as anybody, but the one sixteenth of her which was black outvoted the other fifteen parts and made her a Negro. She was a slave, and salable as such.

Yes, I am of old family, and not illiterate. I am a fossil.   A which?   Fossil. The first horses were fossils. They date back two million years.

It is not well, when writing an autobiography, to follow your ancestry down too close to your own time—it is safest to speak only vaguely of your great-grandfather, and then skip from there to yourself, which I now do. I was born without teeth—and there Richard III had the advantage of me; but I was born without a humpback, likewise, and there I had the advantage of him. My parents were neither very poor nor conspicuously honest. But

But now a thought occurs to me. My own history would really seem so tame contrasted with that of my ancestors, that it is simply wisdom to leave it unwritten until I am hanged. If some other biographies I have read had stopped with the ancestry until a like event occurred, it would have been a felicitous thing, for the reading public. How does it strike you? AWFUL

Listen — and do not doubt me, for I shall speak the exact truth. Howard Tracy, I am no more an earl's child than you are!

the lawful slave of a scion of slaves

India is, the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grandmother of tradition. Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured ... in India only.

There is much talk nowadays of blood and soil [Blut und Boden] as frequently invoked powers. Literati, whom one comes across even today, have already seized hold of them. Blood and soil are certainly powerful and necessary, but they are not a sufficient condition for the Dasein of a people.

we are the sum of all the dead that went before us. And

Your father is your f-father regardless, Agnes. Birth and b-breeding do not always depend upon small matters like who provided the seed.

Recuerda usted lo que afirma Darwin sobre la música? Sostiene que la capacidad de producirla y de apreciarla existió en la raza humana mucho antes de que esta alcanzase la facultad de la palabra. Quizá sea esta la razón de que influya en nosotros de una manera tan sutil. Existen en nuestras almas confusos recuerdos de aquellos siglos nebulosos en que el mundo se hallaba en su niñez.

see me now your severed daughter laughing our name into echo all the world shall remember

I am Black because I come from the earth's inside Now take my word for jewel in the open light. Audre Lorde

When the sins of our fathers visit us We do not have to play host. We can banish them with forgiveness As God, in His Largeness and Laws. —August Wilson

I gazed around the room and my eyes stopped dead on a little boy standing in the corner. This was a particularly eerie doll. Life-sized and blond-haired and blue-eyed. I saw a little Nazi boy, pockets probably stuffed with scissors and retractable blades. My grandfather on my mother's side was rumored to be half Jewish, which practically makes me Jerry Seinfeld's brother, and thus wary of blond German boys with their hands out of sight.

Fransisco, you're some kind of very high nobility, aren't you? He answered, Not yet. The reason my family has lasted for such a long time is that none of us has ever been permitted to think he is born a d'Anconia. We are expected to become one.

Something peculiar is happening to my head. I remember that my father was Barnaby, but I had another named Balaton. Unless that's a lake in Albania.

You can dig through public records and other documents to find out if a certain person had an Aryan grandmother, but there's no way to tell if that grandmother's Eocene ancestor was a sinanthropus or a pithecanthropus.

Tomorrow he'd see Meg, just as his Luddite ancestor met the hangman.

Who we are takes generations to create and doesn't end with death.

Would-be rulers justified their authority on the basis of their ancestry. Whether they claimed descent from the gods or from an earlier king or legendary hero, their legitimacy depended on the purity of their parents' bloodlines and the validity of their parents' marriages. In a world where most of the upper class was busily establishing pretensions to noble blood, the best way to bolster one's legitimacy was to marry someone who also had an august line of ancestors.

When the evening was over Alistair Cooke shook my hand goodbye and held it firmly, saying, 'This hand you are shaking once shook the hand of Bertrand Russell.' 'Wow!' I said, duly impressed. 'No, No,' said Cooke, 'It goes further than that. Bertrand Russell knew Robert Browning. Bertrand Russell's aunt danced with Napoleon. That's how close we all are to history. Just a few handshakes away. Never forget that.