Quotes on Ancestry

My name is Mankiller, and in the old Cherokee Nation, when we lived here in the Southeast, we lived in semi-autonomous villages, and there was someone who watched over the village, who had the title of mankiller. And I'm not sure what you could equate that to, but it was sort of like a soldier or someone who was responsible for the security of the village, and so anyway this one fellow liked the title mankiller so well that he kept it as his name, and that's who we trace our ancestry back to.

Good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.

I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans - but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?

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

Title and ancestry render a good man more illustrious, but an ill one more contemptible.

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

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

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

A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbours.

Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.

We do not draw conclusions with our eyes, but with our reasoning powers, and if the whole of the rest of living nature proclaims with one accord from all sides the evolution of the world of organisms, we cannot assume that the process stopped short of Man. But it follows also that the factors which brought about the development of Man from his Simian ancestry must be the same as those which have brought about the whole of evolution.

Ever since I watched 'Roots,' I've dreamed of tracing my African ancestry and helping other people do the same.

The sharp thorn often produces delicate roses.

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

In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black. In Brazil, it's almost as if one drop of white ancestry makes you white.

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

I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.

When you start about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth.

Part of my ancestry is Cherokee. And in that tradition, you become an adult when you're 52.

Whoever serves his country well has no need of ancestors.

It is the highest of earthly honors to be descended from the great and good. They alone cry out against a noble ancestry who have none of their own.