My ancestors are all crazy. My great-great-granddad, he was the last man to live in a cave in Nottingham.
There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.
This is our history – from the Transcontinental Railroad to the Hoover Dam, to the dredging of our ports and building of our most historic bridges – our American ancestors prioritized growth and investment in our nation’s infrastructure.
It is fashionable in some quarters to say our ancestors were all evil. I reject that notion. I also reject the elitist worldview that these United States are anything but the greatest nation in the history of mankind.
What I would like to do is to leave behind a sustainable entity of a set of companies that operate in an exemplary manner in terms of ethics, values and continue what our ancestors left behind.
You and I probably wouldn’t be here if our ancestors hadn’t been greedy savages.
In a sense, all Americans are battle-born. Our ancestors came here for something better.
We pay for the mistakes of our ancestors, and it seems only fair that they should leave us the money to pay with.
I come from a family that has been here for almost 200 years. My ancestors started a very dangerous gunpowder business in 1802, and my great- grandfather and his father were both killed in gunpowder explosions.
Let them look to the past, but let them also look to the future; let them look to the land of their ancestors, but let them look also to the land of their children.
I’m just confused as to where we lost that in America because it is everyone’s God-given right to think the way they think and that’s fine. That’s why our ancestors came here to America, to believe what they want, pray how they want and follow a religion with whoever they want.
Sweden is the home of my ancestors, and I have reserved a special place in my heart for Sweden.
It turns out one of my ancestors fought in the Continental Army, so I was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution.
As you know, the fossil record includes not only the ancestors of crocodiles and whales, but also the ancestors of human beings. And this, of course, is why evolution remains controversial.
We must strive to become good ancestors.
I went to Cork, Ireland, and stood on the dock some of my ancestors had left from. I felt their ghosts gather round me, and I cried to imagine what it must have felt like – leaving that beautiful land and those beloved people, knowing it was forever.
I think, in many people’s minds, the Confederate battle flag is not only a memorial to our ancestors, which is perfectly OK, but also a symbol of white superiority and an inclination for people to believe that even slavery would’ve been OK.
Being a son of the South puts you in a different position when it comes to the Confederate flag. It means something entirely different to the people who have ancestors who fought in the Civil War on the south side of the Mason-Dixon line.
I don’t think many of us face the same sort of physical adventures our ancestors did, at least not on a daily basis.
Much as I wish it were not so, we do live in a dangerous world. It has, in fact, always been this way. Our earliest ancestors had to worry about predators, natural disasters, disease, and – unique among our species – attacks by other people.
All of our ancestors came from somewhere.
Humanity is still advancing; and it will probably continue to advance for hundreds of thousands of years more, always on condition that we know how to keep the same line of advance as our ancestors towards ever greater consciousness and complexity.
I’ve always thought you have to live life looking forwards, not backwards. I’ve had no interest at all in who my ancestors are.
Distinguished ancestors shed a powerful light on their descendants, and forbid the concealment either of their merits or of their demerits.
It’s hard for me to believe that the KKK still exists, especially knowing all my ancestors have been through. I feel like the history and meaning of all we have been through has been trashed.
So long as procreation stems from parents of the same race, appearance and lineage are typically congruent. Interracial unions give rise to added complexity. Interracial amalgamation will produce some individuals whose features diverge from those commonly ascribed to the races of their ancestors.
My eating mantra is, you should eat what your ancestors ate. It’s true that the quality of vegetables, fruits and meat is of no comparison from then to now, but in principle the staple is easily digestible if it was part of your evolution lineage.
Two hundred years ago, bathrooms didn’t exist. The bathroom’s development has not been a straightforward matter, and you might be surprised to learn that many Tudor people had worse personal hygiene than their medieval ancestors.
It has been said that a man of genius should select his ancestors with great care – and yet there does not seem to be as much in heredity as most people think. The children of the great are often small.
I’ve never lived in Eastern Europe, although both my wife and I have ancestors in Poland and Russia – but I can see the scenes I create.
My parents came to America in the late 1960s because my father studied for a Ph.D. in Indiana. My mother joined him later. We had ancestors who came over at the turn of the century. One worked in a laundry, as is typical of Chinese-American immigrants.
In archaeology, context is the basis of many discoveries that are imputed to the deliberate workings of intelligence. If I find a rock chipped in such a way as to give it a sharp edge, and the discovery is made in a cave, I am seduced into ascribing this to tool use by distant, fetid and furry ancestors.
My ancestors are Rajputs from Jaipur, a lineage of the royal family.
Most of us do more than subsist. From the vantage point of our ancestors, we live lives of almost unimaginable ease. Here again, we have innovation to thank.
We hope to find more pieces of the puzzle which will shed light on the connection between this upright, walking ape, our early ancestor, and modern man.
When I first heard the minstrel banjo – I played a gourd first – I almost lost my mind. I was like, Oh, my god. And then I went to Africa, to the Gambia, and studied the akonting, which is an ancestor of the banjo, and just that connection to me was just immense.
Ledger art represents a spirit which has lasted through the hardships and turmoil. It is my goal and ambition that this style of pictograph art continues to pay tribute to the perseverance of my ancestors who adapted and created works of art during a period of life changing turmoil and injustice.
As I got more involved in music, one of the things that made me excited, from the time I was a child, was that clear link between our ancestors and the sounds we hear today.
I, too, am convinced that our ancestors came from Africa.
My ancestors had to keep their customs secret for fear of death or persecution, so it’s common to be secretive and discreet about Regla de Ocha. But it’s my family’s spirituality, so I don’t want to keep it secret.
Indeed, if our ancestors of millions of years ago hadn’t learned how to care for one another and hunt in packs, they’d all have ended up being eaten by leopards.
I’ve run the marathon several times, so I definitely don’t look like the Great Ancestor!
