Ancestry Quotes - Page 2

When real nobleness accompanies that imaginary one of birth, the imaginary seems to mix with real, and becomes real too.

Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.

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.

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

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

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

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

Those who have nothing else to recommend them to the respect of others but only their blood, cry it up at a great rate, and have their mouth perpetually full of it. They swell and vapor, and you are sure to hear of their families and relations every third word.

What is birth to a man if it shall be a stain to his dead ancestors to have left such an offspring?

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

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

Sire, I am my own Rudolph of Hapsburg.

It is disgraceful when the passers-by exclaim, "O ancient house! alas, how unlike is thy present master to thy former one.

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

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.

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.

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

It is better to be the builder of our own name than to be indebted by descent for the proudest gifts known to the books of heraldry.

Few sons attain the praise Of their great sires and most their sires disgrace.

Breed is stronger than pasture.

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.

Some decent regulated pre-eminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth, is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolite.

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.

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.

The egg it is the source of all To everyone's ancestral hall.