Ancestry Quotes

Is anyone simply by birth to be applauded or punished?

Hitopadesa

Reporters used to be blue-collar at the Globe now, it's practically required that you have a trust fund.

Howie Carr

Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Unworthy offspring brag the most about their worthy descendants.

Danish proverb

Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman loves a pedigree.

George Bernard Shaw

Good breeding is the result of good sense, some good nature, and a little self-denial for the sake of others.

Lord Chesterfield

The scholar without good breeding is a nitpicker; the philosopher a cynic; the soldier a brute and everyone else disagreeable.

Lord Chesterfield

Clever father, clever daughter; clever mother, clever son.

Proverb

The kind of ancestors we have had is not as important as the kind of descendants our ancestors have.

Source Unknown

High birth is an accident, not a virtue.

Pietro Metastasio

Stillness and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding. Vulgar persons can't sit still, or at least must always work their limbs and features.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Every man is an omnibus in which his ancestors ride.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The sharp thorn often produces delicate roses.

Ovid

I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule.

W. S. Gilbert

Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

Mark Twain

There is a certain class of people who prefer to say that their fathers came down in the world through their own follies than to boast that they rose in the world through their own industry and talents. It is the same shabby-genteel sentiment, the same vanity of birth which makes men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels rather than elevated apes.

W. Winwood Reade

It is indeed a desirable thing to be well-descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors.

Plutarch

None of us can boast about the morality of our ancestors. The record does not show that Adam and Eve were ever married.

Edward W. Howe

I don't know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be.

Abraham Lincoln

The person who has nothing to brag about but their ancestors is like a potato; the best part of them is underground.

Sir Thomas Overbore