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.
The behavior of an individual is determined not by his racial affiliation, but by the character of his ancestry and his cultural environment.
Pride thyself on what virtue thou hast, and not on thy parentage.
It has been estimated that one third of our Western civilization bears the mark of its Jewish ancestry.
I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.
Heredity is nothing but stored environment.
Conventional names define a person's past: ancestry, ethnicity, nationality, religion. I am not who I was ten years ago and certainly not who I will be in twenty years
Those who boast of their descent, brag on what they owe to others.
My forefathers didn't come over on the Mayflower, but they met the boat.
In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black.
It is indeed a striking proof of the essential soundness of the tradition that with which all these thousands of copies, tracing their ancestry back to so many different parts of the earth and to conditions of such diverse kinds, the variations of text are so entirely questions of detail, not of essential substance.
It is almost impossible to overemphasize the importance with which ancestry is held in the Middle East and North Africa.
Breed is stronger than pasture.
Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding.
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.
Watching a dog try to chew a large piece of toffee is a pastime fit for gods. Mr. Fusspot's mixed ancestry had given him a dexterity of jaw that was truly awesome. He somersaulted happily around the floor, making faces like a rubber gargoyle in a washing machine.
What is birth to a man if it shall be a stain to his dead ancestors to have left such an offspring?
Sire, I am my own Rudolph of Hapsburg.
. . . the cooperative forces are biologically the more important and vital. The balance between the cooperative and altruistic tendencies and those which are disoperative and egoistic is relatively close. Under many conditions the cooperative forces lose, In the long run, however, the group centered, more altruistic drives are slightly stronger. . . . human altruistic drives are as firmly based on an animal ancestry as is man himself. Our tendencies toward goodness. . . are as innate as our tendencies toward intelligence; we could do well with more of both.
Every man is an omnibus in which his ancestors ride.