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.
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.
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.
What can ennoble sots, or slaves, or cowards? Alas! not all the blood, of all the Howards.
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.
It should be remembered that hundreds of people of African ancestry also walked the Trail of Tears with the Cherokee during the forced removal of 1838-1839. Although we know about the terrible human suffering of our native people and the members of other tribes during the removal, we rarely hear of those black people who also suffered.
Men who pride themselves on their ancestry are like the potato plant, the most part of which is under ground.
It is with antiquity as with ancestry, nations are proud of the one, and individuals of the other; but if they are nothing in themselves, that which is their pride ought to be their humiliation.
A Nation. . . is a group of persons united by a common error about their ancestry, and a common dislike of their neighbors
Ever since I watched 'Roots,' I've dreamed of tracing my African ancestry and helping other people do the same.
Pedigree and ancestry and what we ourselves have not achieved, I scarcely recognize as our own.
It is indeed a desirable thing to be well-descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors.
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
During the 1960s, one neighborhood in San Francisco had the lowest income, the highest unemployment rate, the highest proportion of families with incomes under four thousand dollars a year, the least educational attainment, the highest tuberculosis rate, and the highest proportion of substandard housing. . . That neighborhood was called Chinatown. Yet, in 1965, there were only five persons of Chinese ancestry committed to prison in the entire state of California.
We really invented the genre of tracing family trees and going back as far as we could on the paper trail. When the paper trail disappeared, we used DNA analysis. The technology was just being invented that allowed you to trace ancestry through DNA.
I've never felt grounded because of my ancestry or my gender. I think until women get away from that they're not going to be great writers.
A man's ancestry is a positive property to him.
Breed is stronger than pasture.
By ancestry, I was born to rule.
I get anxious. That lovely Jewish guilt that comes with ancestry.