Ancestor Quotes - Page 3

• Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

  Edward Dahlberg

  Writing, Agriculture, Farming

  Edward Dahlberg (1964). “Alms for oblivion: essays”

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• But it is obvious that our fathers, whose efforts have planted these great and prosperous cities along the once lonely trails of our own broad land, received all the fundamentals of civilization as a heritage from their European ancestors.

  James Henry Breasted

  Lonely, Father, Land

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• I don't have to look up my family tree, because I know that I'm the sap.

  Fred Allen

  Funny, Family, Witty

  Fred Allen (2008). “Much Ado About Me”, p.200, Wildside Press LLC

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• My ancestors wandered lost in the wilderness for forty years because even in biblical times, men would not stop to ask for directions.

  Elayne Boosler

  Biblical, Men, Years

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• People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

  Edmund Burke

  Inspirational, Family, Memories

  Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

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• As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved Echo of our ancestors, the virgin America, has been abandoned. We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves.

  Daniel J. Boorstin

  Love, Conceited, America

  Daniel J. Boorstin (2012). “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America”, p.257, Vintage

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• 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.

  Jeff Hawkins

  Believe, Facts, Ancestry

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• I admire our ancestors, whoever they were. I think the first self-conscious person must have shaken in his boots. Because as he becomes self-conscious, he's no longer part of nature. He sees himself against nature. He looks at the vastness of the universe and it looks hostile.

  John Shelby Spong

  Thinking, Self, Looks

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• Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.

  Ralph Ellison

  Relationship, Cousin, People

  Time Magazine, March 27, 1964.

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• Whoever serves his country well has no need of ancestors.

  Voltaire

  Country, Uprising, Needs

  "Mérope". Play by Voltaire. Act I, Scene III, 1743.

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• 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.

  Richard Leakey

  Men, Light, Connections

  "A Wealth of Human Fossils Could Soon Be Destroyed". Interview with Stefan Aust and Thilo Thielke, www.spiegel.de. October 27, 2005.

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• The ancestor of every action is a thought.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Learning, Knowledge, Positive Thinking

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2008). “The Spiritual Emerson: Essential Works by Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.53, Penguin

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• We must create the Georgia that our ancestors dreamed of, the Georgia that we dream of.

  Mikhail Saakashvili

  Dream, Georgia

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• Some of my ancestors were religious dissenters who came to America over three hundred years ago. Others were abolitionists in New England in the eighteen forties and fifties.

  Pete Seeger

  Religious, Years, America

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• Man is physical as well as metaphysical, a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Misfits, Metaphysical

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “The Selected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.202, Graphic Arts Books

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• The people of western Missouri are, in some respects, very peculiar. We will take Jackson county where I was born for instance. In that section the people seemed to be born fighters, the instinct being inherited from a long line of ancestors.

  Cole Younger

  Long, People, Peculiar

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• Humans are upsetting a fragile balance that their own human ancestors established.

  Joan D. Vinge

  Upset, Balance, Humans

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• My first name - I have no middle name - was chosen by my father, as he told me, on that solitary walk in the forested hills. He selected it from a verse of the seventh chapter of Isaiah; there was no Immanuel among our ancestors known to him.

  Immanuel Velikovsky

  Father, Names, Firsts

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• Big cities are chaotic. And chaos for humans - who have experience from their ancestors - is the last step before conflict. So, in the park, every kind of visual contradiction has been eliminated.

  John Hench

  Cities, Lasts, Parks

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• I think these people have betrayed or have forgotten their ancestors.

  Zhu Rongji

  Thinking, People, Betrayed

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• 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.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Succeed, Bears, Dignity

  "History of England" by Thomas B. Macaulay, Vol. I, (Ch. 1), 1849-1861.

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• I have often noticed that ancestors never boast of the descendants who boast of ancestors. I would rather start a family than finish one. Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.

  Don Marquis

  Blood, Literature, Too Much

  Don Marquis (2006). “The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel”, p.136, Penguin

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• To me it seems that the warm blooded dinosaurs replaced advanced mammal ancestors that were warm blooded, also.

  Robert T. Bakker

  Mammals, Dinosaurs, Seems

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• Sweden is the home of my ancestors, and I have reserved a special place in my heart for Sweden.

  Carl David Anderson

  Home, Heart, Special

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• The book begins and ends with the visits to give the impression of a tunnel into their ancestors and family history. I believe in going backwards into the past - I felt I was digging a tunnel back to the past.

  Anita Desai

  Believe, Book, Past

  "Class Interview with Anita Desai". www.baruch.cuny.edu. 2003.

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