quotes about Ancestry
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I didn't know much about my Native American ancestry, but as I got older I became more interested in it.
-- Alan Robinson -
What can ennoble sots, or slaves, or cowards? Alas! not all the blood, of all the Howards.
-- Alexander Pope -
...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...
-- Ashley Montagu -
There are many kinds of conceit, but the chief one is to let people know what a very ancient and gifted family one descends from.
-- Benvenuto CelliniSource : Benvenuto Cellini (1956). “The Autobiography”
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The egg it is the source of all To everyone's ancestral hall.
-- Clarence DaySource : CLARENCE DAY (1948). “THE BEST”
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If the means were available, we could trace our ancestry - yours and mine - back to the first blob of life-like material that came into being on the planet
-- Clifford D. SimakSource : "Speaking of Science Fiction". Book by Paul Walker, 1978.
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We are very fond of some families because they can be traced beyond the Conquest, whereas indeed the farther back, the worse, as being the nearer allied to a race of robbers and thieves.
-- Daniel Defoe -
The behavior of an individual is determined not by his racial affiliation, but by the character of his ancestry and his cultural environment.
-- Franz BoasSource : Franz Boas (1969). “Race and Democratic Society”, p.27, Biblo & Tannen Publishers
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When real nobleness accompanies that imaginary one of birth, the imaginary seems to mix with real, and becomes real too.
-- Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke -
The theater, when it is potent enough to deserve its ancestry, is always dangerous; that is why it is instinctively feared by people who do not want change, but only preservation of the status quo.
-- Hallie Flanagan -
Few sons attain the praise Of their great sires and most their sires disgrace.
-- Homer -
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It has been estimated that one third of our Western civilization bears the mark of its Jewish ancestry.
-- Huston Smith -
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.
-- Jacques MonodSource : Jacques Monod (1972). “Chance and necessity: an essay on the natural philosophy of modern biology”, Vintage
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And, you know, the fact is, if you believe in evolution, we all have a common ancestor, and we all have a common ancestry with the plant in the lobby. This is what evolution tells us. And, it's true. It's kind of unbelievable.
-- Jeff Hawkins -
Nobility of birth is like a cipher; it has no power in itself, like wealth or talent; but, it tells with all the power of a cipher when added to either of the other two.
-- John Frederick BoyesSource : John Frederick Boyes (1859). “Life and Books: Or, Records of Thought and Reading”, p.58
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It is worthwhile for anyone to have behind him a few generations of honest, hard-working ancestry.
-- John Phillips -
Don't you dare take the lazy way. It's too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry. Don't let me catch you doing it! Now -- look close at me so you will remember. Whatever you do, it will be you who do.
-- John Steinbeck -
In the founders of great families, titles or attributes of honor are generally correspondent with the virtues of the person to whom they are applied; but in their descendants they are too often the marks rather of grandeur than of merit. The stamp and denomination still continue, but the intrinsic value is frequently lost.
-- Joseph Addison -
All scientists agree that evolution has occurred-that all life comes from a common ancestry, that there has been extinction, and that new taxa, new biological groups, have arisen. The question is, is natural selection enough to explain evolution? Is it the driver of evolution?
-- Lynn Margulis -
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It is disgraceful when the passers-by exclaim, "O ancient house! alas, how unlike is thy present master to thy former one.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero -
Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
-- Mark Twain -
People who can comfort the dead can also chase after them to hurt them further-a reverse ancestor worship.
-- Maxine Hong Kingston -
I get anxious. That lovely Jewish guilt that comes with ancestry.
-- Maya Rudolph -
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Maybe if I go far enough back into my ancestry, I have African roots or something. I've got no idea
-- Mick Taylor -
Though you be sprung in direct line from Hercules, if you show a lowborn meanness, that long succession of ancestors whom you disgrace are so many witnesses against you; and this grand display of their tarnished glory but serves to make your ignominy more evident.
-- Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux -
Pedigree and ancestry and what we ourselves have not achieved, I scarcely recognize as our own.
-- Ovid -
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What is birth to a man if it shall be a stain to his dead ancestors to have left such an offspring?
-- Philip Sidney -
We are all creatures of our ancestry! There is no right and wrong, objectively.
-- Piers Anthony -
A mule has neither pride of ancestry nor hope of posterity.
-- Robert Green Ingersoll -
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So what we can answer [as geneticists] is questions about biology, about biological ancestry. But to make any sense of that historically we have to contextualize it -- the archaeology, the linguistic pattern, even the climatology.
-- Spencer WellsSource : "Finding the roots of modern humans" by Marsha Walton, www.cnn.com. April 14, 2005.
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It is almost impossible to overemphasize the importance with which ancestry is held in the Middle East and North Africa.
-- Tahir Shah -
You, the sons of the pioneers, if you are true to your ancestry, must make your lives as worthy as they made theirs. They sought for true success, and therefore they did not seek ease. They knew that success comes only to those who lead the life of endeavor
-- Theodore Roosevelt -
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. GilbertSource : W. S. Gilbert, Ian C. Bradley (2016). “The Complete Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan”, p.637, Oxford University Press
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High birth is a thing which I never knew any one to disparage except those who had it not; and I never knew any one to make a boast of it who had anything else to be proud of.
-- William Warburton -
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.
-- Elliott SoberSource : Source: www.3ammagazine.com
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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.
-- Elliott SoberSource : Source: www.3ammagazine.com
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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.
-- Elliott SoberSource : Source: www.3ammagazine.com
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A Nation... is a group of persons united by a common error about their ancestry, and a common dislike of their neighbors
-- Karl DeutschSource : Karl Wolfgang Deutsch (1969). “Nationalism and its alternatives”
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Ancestry is most important to those who have done nothing themselves.
-- Louis L'Amour -
Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. -
I do have a muse. I am not sure how to describe her. She can be very elusive. She was born in England but has Mediterranean ancestry.
-- Quentin S. Crisp -
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The theory of evolution explains to us what our ancestry has been. It does not explain away our worth. Why should we be afraid to learn more about what we are?
-- Philip KitcherSource : Philip Kitcher (1982). “Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism”, p.202, MIT Press