Top 170 Ancestry Quotes & Sayings

It has been estimated that one third of our Western civilization bears the mark of its Jewish ancestry.

Some men by ancestry are only the shadow of a mighty name.

We are inescapably the result of a long heritage of learning, adaptation, mutation and evolution, the product of a history which predates our birth as a biological species and stretches back over many thousand millennia... Going further back, we share a common ancestry with our fellow primates; and going still further back, we share a common ancestry with all other living creatures and plants down to the simplest microbe. The further back we go, the greater the difference from external appearances and behavior patterns which we observe today.

Blood is a destiny. One's genius descends in the stream from long lines of ancestry.

I get anxious. That lovely Jewish guilt that comes with ancestry.

When I'm in England, I know I'm a visitor, but being a white man in England with ancestry that's German and Italian, I have a history with the Romans and the Saxons. I feel some connection and ancestry here, as weird as that sounds.

I like to honor my West African and Taino ancestry, I consider it sacred and divine.

This reference to the Scots side of her ancestry is the first of two visual explorations into Tori Amos's diverse cultural past. As is the case for many of us, Tori's ancestry is a mix of races and religions, philosophies and professions, fortunes and foibles. What to some may seem like a family tree grown wild and untamed is actually a mighty oak that has weathered life's many storms and can still put out a rare and beautiful blossom like Tori.

DNA ties us all together; we share ancestry with barracuda and bacteria and mushrooms, if you go far enough back.

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

The man who has nothing to boast of but his illustrious ancestry is like the potato - the best part under ground.

Had (I) been a member of a more popular race, I should have been inclined to yield to the temptation of depending upon my ancestry and my colour to do that for me which I should do for myself. Years ago I resolved that because I had no ancestry myself I would leave a record of which my children would be proud, and which might encourage them to still higher effort

Maybe if I go far enough back into my ancestry, I have African roots or something. I've got no idea.

I've never felt grounded because of my ancestry or my gender. I think until women get away from that they're not going to be great writers.

There is no more fascinating subject in which a person may become occupied than an examination into the history of his ancestry.

We are all creatures of our ancestry! There is no right and wrong, objectively.

Men who pride themselves on their ancestry are like the potato plant, the most part of which is under ground.

Unite all people of African ancestry of the world to one great body to establish a country and absolute government of their own.

My ancestry is really weird, because my great grandfather was from the Cayman Islands, and then his father was from England. But I lose track at that point.

People like to trace their ancestry.

Birth and ancestry, and that which we have not ourselves achieved, we can scarcely call our own.

The secret to a long-lasting relationship is perpetually imagining the worst. It's a world view tracing back to my Eastern European ancestry and one I draw upon regularly.

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.

If we remind ourselves of the fact that every fifth American today rightly points and perhaps also with a certain degree of pride to his German ancestry or her German ancestry, we can safely say that we, indeed, share common roots.

Current organisms have a higher probability of sharing a single code if the common ancestry hypothesis is true than they'd have if the hypothesis of separate ancestry were true. That is, the simpler hypothesis has the higher likelihood in the technical sense of "likelihood" used in statistics.

I have a musical ancestry as much as I have a family ancestry. Honoring those ancestors gives you access to a greater source of appreciation and information than you would have if you were just going on your own ego system.

It is worthwhile for anyone to have behind him a few generations of honest, hard-working ancestry.

I've always been fascinated by family ancestry.

A man's ancestry is a positive property to him.

No self is of itself alone. It has a long chain of intellectual ancestors. The "I" is chained to ancestry by many factors ... This is not mere allegory, but an eternal memory.

I've got some Jewish ancestry and I don't like waste.

I have Spanish ancestry and, indeed, speak the language, up to a point.

My knowledge of my ancestry, like a lot of black people not living in Africa today, is very vague.

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

Ancestry is most important to those who have done nothing themselves.

Any nobody from the folk blues world could avoid being influenced by Woody Guthrie, who is actually of Scottish-Irish ancestry.

I didn't know much about my Native American ancestry, but as I got older I became more interested in it.

It is almost impossible to overemphasize the importance with which ancestry is held in the Middle East and North Africa.

There's so many people who move around our country and lose track of their own ancestry. It's nice to know where you come from.

The man who has nothing to boast of but his illustrious ancestry is like the potato. The best part is underground.

Knowing that my ancestry had all been quite wealthy and owned their own businesses probably left me with the ambition to replicate what they'd done.

The big picture, I think, is that common ancestry is evidentially prior to natural selection in Darwin's theory and in contemporary evolutionary biology as well.

Every living being is also a fossil. Within it, all the way down to the microscopic structure of its proteins, it bears the traces if not the stigmata of its ancestry.

Darwin repeatedly used the hypothesis of common ancestry as a platform on which to build his various ideas about testing hypotheses concerning natural selection. He also argued that adaptive similarities provide little or no evidence for common ancestry. Although this second claim needs to be fine-tuned, Darwin was right that ample evidence for common ancestry can exist even if none of the characteristics we observe were caused to evolve by natural selection.

While we appreciate our ancestry as Americans or even our ethnic ancestry and our color of skin, we believe that our real citizenship is in Heaven.

All of the guests on 'Faces of America' were deeply moved by what we revealed about their ancestry. We were able to trace the ancestry of Native American writer Louise Erdrich back to 438 A.D. We found that Queen Noor is descended from royalty, and that's before she married King Hussein of Jordan.

Pedigree and ancestry and what we ourselves have not achieved, I scarcely recognize as our own.

It is with antiquity as with ancestry, nations are proud of the one, and individuals of the other; but if they are nothing in themselves, that which is their pride ought to be their humiliation.

I've got German, Cornish and Scottish ancestry. It might help explain my affinity for forests, the sea, and fatty foods.

The Pride of ancestry increases in the ratio of distance.

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.

Maybe if I go far enough back into my ancestry, I have African roots or something. I've got no idea

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

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

The original mixed ancestry of the Jews and their subsequent history of intermixture with every people among whom they have lived and continue to live.

Both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.

By ancestry, I was born to rule.

I'm crazy about Dublin. If you went back 3,000 years in my ancestry you wouldn't find a drop of Irish blood in the veins, but I love the place.

A mule has neither pride of ancestry nor hope of posterity.

I grew up in North Devon, by the sea, and feel a special affinity for the landscape there, despite a lack of actual ancestry.