Quotations on Ancestry

Whoever serves his country well has no need of ancestors.

~ Voltaire

Some decent, regulated preeminence, some preference given to birth, is neither unnatural nor unjust nor impolite.

~ Edmund Burke

Breed is stronger than pasture.

~ George Eliot

Birth is nothing where virtue is not.

~ Moliere

I would like to be like my father and all the rest of my ancestors who never married.

~ Moliere

We are all omnibuses in which our ancestors ride, and every now and then one of them sticks his head out and embarrasses us.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

It is of no consequence of what parents a man is born, so he be man of merit.

~ Horace

My father was a Creole, his father a Negro, and his father a monkey; my family, it seems, begins where yours left off.

~ Alexandre Dumas

The happiest lot for a man, as far as birth is concerned, is that it should be such as to give him but little occasion to think much about it.

~ Richard Whately

Everyone has something ancestral, even if it is nothing more than a disease.

~ Ed Howe

We inherit nothing truly, but what our actions make us worthy of.

~ George Chapman

Everyone has ancestors and it is only a question of going back far enough to find a good one.

~ Howard Kenneth Nixon

It is indeed a desirable thing to be well descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors.

~ Plutarch

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

~ H.F. Hedge

The man who has nothing to boast of but his illustrious ancestry, is like the potato - the best part under ground.

~ Thomas Overbury

Some men by ancestry are only the shadow of a mighty name.

~ Lucan

Our ancestors are very good kind of folks; but they are the last people I should choose to have a visiting acquaintance with.

~ Richard Brinsley Sheridan