Top 200 Ancestors Quotes

I am 3.8 percent Neanderthal. One of my ancestors mated with a Neanderthal, and I am not embarrassed by that.

I’m enormously proud of being the ancestor of a convict. That’s mad, isn’t it, but I really am.

I traveled to Ireland to research ‘Sandcastles,’ to visit the coastline where my ancestors looked toward America, the tiny town they once loved so much, and the docks from which they sailed toward their dreams of building a better life for their family. The answers I found on that journey are woven through the novel.

Traditionally, our ancestors boiled mushrooms in water to make a soothing tea. Boiling served several purposes: killing contaminants, softening the flesh, and extracting the rich soluble polysaccharides.

Most of our ancestors were not perfect ladies and gentlemen. The majority of them weren’t even mammals.

There is beauty in our roots. Sometimes we think our roots are shameful, and people tell you that you’re no good or your ancestors are no good or that you come from a neighborhood of no hope and terrible crime. But it’s about the beauty of those places, and I carry that with me.

There is no escape – we pay for the violence of our ancestors.

I have a profound interest in embroidery, as I have female ancestors on both sides who embroidered their way through great trials.

We are a continuum. Just as we reach back to our ancestors for our fundamental values, so we, as guardians of that legacy, must reach ahead to our children and their children. And we do so with a sense of sacredness in that reaching.

In France, when there was a war, we fought and our ancestors fought, though many had real reason to flee the Germans.

I like knowing that the further back one traces any lineage, the narrower the path grows, to the haunt of just a few shaggy ancestors, with luck on their side, little gizmos in their cells and a future storied with impulses and choices that will ultimately define them.

Jesus is an example. We have other examples, including many of our ancestors as role models who understood the inner meaning of our orientation.

It is because I recognize the brutality with which my own multi-branched ancestors have been treated that I can identify the despicable, lawless, cruel, and sadistic behavior that has characterized Israel’s attempts to erase a people, the Palestinians, from their own land.

Being the U.S. champion is a big deal for me. Knowing that my ancestors built this country, it’s kind of like, the Irish were treated badly in this country for a long time, with a lot of tacky Irish stereotypes, so to me, it’s kind of like a bragging right.

My ancestors come from a part of southern China where most villages can trace their roots back at least a thousand years or even more. However, as a typical American, I have lived in four cities and moved at least seven times.

English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.

Genealogy is among the fastest-growing leisure pursuits in the U.K. Indeed, the urge to uncover the truth about our ancestors has proved so compelling that, when the 1901 census first went online, the website crashed after a million people logged on within hours of its launch.

Strangely enough, among my dad’s things, I found the diary of an ancestor who was born in 1797 and became a ventriloquist in London. That was quite chilling. It described exactly how I was as a child but 150 years earlier – doing voices, pretending to be a ventriloquist.

Latinos have fought in all of America’s wars, beginning with the Revolutionary War. Many Latinos are fighting and dying for our country today in Iraq, just as several of their ancestors fought for freedom in Mexico over a century ago.

OUR history begins before we are born. We represent the hereditary influences of our race, and our ancestors virtually live in us.

The world is well supplied with spiders whose male ancestors died after mating. The world is bereft of spiders whose would-be ancestors never mated in the first place.

Breathing air is a liberating experience. It freed our ancestors from the constraints of staying wet or having to remain within easy reach of water for refuge, respiration or reproduction. But the biggest change it made in our lives was to expose us to a whole new range of sensory experience.

In the developed world, we live 30 years longer, on average, than our ancestors born a century ago, but the price we pay for those added years is the rise of chronic diseases.

So much of the physical world has been explored. But the deluge of data I get to investigate really lets me chart new territory. Genetic data from people living today forms an archaeological record of what happened to their ancestors 10,000 years ago.

Science offers us the possibility of understanding natural rhythms and events that must have seemed like the work of angry and unpredictable gods to our ancestors.

I think my ancestors had to be enormously strong emotionally and very courageous.

All Americans are either immigrants or descendants of ancestors who came from somewhere else, including Native Americans. We should all respect and admire immigrants.

I believe there is a strong familial pull as the influence of beloved ancestors continues with us from the other side of the veil.

Every man is his own ancestor, and every man is his own heir. He devises his own future, and he inherits his own past.

I love many places to which I have no connection, but identifying an ancestor, or someone I think is an ancestor, has taken me to places I’d never have gone to otherwise.

It’s important to remember that we evolved. Now, I know that’s a dirty word for some people, but we evolved from common ancestors with the gorillas, the chimpanzee and also the bonobos. We have a common past, and we have a common future.

We split from our common ancestor with the octopus half a billion years ago. And yet, you can make friends with an octopus.

I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors.

I find my husband’s family history fascinating, as they can trace the family lineage back to ancestors who fought, and died, in the first battle of the Revolution, as well as to many other interesting people.

My parents came from the south. So their ancestors were actually slaves in this country.

I come from a community that has a lot of white kids, and I notice how, a lot of times, they don’t understand our differences and how I come from a different culture and my ancestors are different and my history is different.

In arguing that machines think, we are in the same fix as Darwin when he argued that man shares common ancestors with monkeys, or Galileo when he argued that the Earth spins on its axis.

Generational change within a genre is hard to parse while it’s happening. Only in retrospect can the passing of the baton from ancestors to progeny be clearly discerned.

You notice patterns. White guests often are mortified – that word again – when they learn their ancestors owned slaves. But I’ve never had a black guest who was upset to learn about white ancestry that probably involved forced sexual relations.

We are so indebted to our ancestors, musically speaking, that they have left us 400 years of music.

We are a country where the ancestors of slaves and newcomers escaping tyranny and violence can rise to the highest positions in the land.

I love myself, I love my skin, and I love my history. I’m grateful for who I am, grateful for the people who made me, my ancestors, and I wouldn’t change a thing.

Our ancestors went through so much in a fight for us to vote. So I believe that we should engage in all civic participation. It’s healthy engagement.

It’s very clear from Biblical history and Jewish history that Jewish monotheism wasn’t developed in an instant, that it became gradually the accepted norm. But undoubtedly, Jewish ancestors were polytheists.

When I looked at the family tree and at where my ancestors lived, it was places like Rothbury and Tropton! I was going, ‘No, that can’t be the reason why I feel so at home there.’ But could it be in my DNA? It’s kind of shocking.

I am a Jew, and every single one of my ancestors was Jewish. And it does not bother me even a little bit when people call those beautiful lit up, bejeweled trees Christmas trees. I don’t feel threatened. I don’t feel discriminated against.

We can only solve our biggest problems if we come together and embrace the freedoms that our Founding Fathers established right here in Philadelphia, which permitted our ancestors to create the great American exceptionalism that all of us now enjoy.

For over two billion years, through the apparent fancy of her endless differentiations and metamorphosis the Cell, as regards its basic physiological mechanisms, has remained one and the same. It is life itself, and our true and distant ancestor.