Ancestry Quotes

I have had my mother's wing of my genetic ancestry analyzed by the tracing service and there it all is: the arrow moving northward from the African savannah, skirting the Mediterranean by way of the Levant, and passing through Eastern and Central Europe before crossing to the British Isles. And all of this knowable by an analysis of the cells on the inside of my mouth.I almost prefer the more rambling and indirect and journalistic investigation, which seems somehow less deterministic.

Christopher Hitchens

The precise form of an individual's activity is determined, of course, by the equipment with which he came into the world. In other words, it is determined by his heredity.

Henry Louis

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

Seneca (Seneca the Elder)

Those who boast of their descent, brag on what they owe to others.

Seneca (Seneca the Elder)

No one is better born than another, unless they are born with better abilities and a more amiable disposition.

Seneca (Seneca the Elder)

Mules are always boasting that their ancestors were horses.

Proverb

In church your grandsire cut his throat; to do the job too long he tarried: he should have had my hearty vote to cut his throat before he married.

Jonathan Swift

We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.

Joyce Carol Oates

My ancestors didn't come over on the Mayflower, but they were there to meet the boat.

Will Rogers

We owe it to our ancestors to preserve entire those rights they have delivered to our care. We owe it to our posterity not to suffer their dearest inheritance to be destroyed.

Junius, letter to London Publick

They talk about their Pilgrim blood, their birthright high and holy! a mountain-stream that ends in mud thinks is melancholy.

James Russell Lowell

Do well and you will have no need for ancestors.

Voltaire (FrançoisMarie Arouet)

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

Proverb

Hereditary honors are a noble and a splendid treasure to descendants.

Plato

Heredity is nothing, but stored environment.

Luther Burbank

Breed is stronger than pasture.

George Eliot

I don't have to look up my family tree, because I know that I'm the sap.

Fred A. Allen

Good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Genealogy. An account of one's descent from an ancestor who did not particularly care to trace his own.

Ambrose Bierce

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

Nicholas Boileau