Quotes About Ancestors

We are creatures. We have a link with a native habitat just like every other species. Throughout most of human history, physical activity was unavoidable, calories were scarce and hard to get. In the modern era, calories are unavoidable, physical activity is scare and hard to get. The traits that allowed our ancestors to survive, and let's face it, the survival of our ancestors is the reason that we're here because the people who don't survive and make very crummy ancestors, are our traits. But they're very much at odds with the modern environment.

To the feudal aristocracy and the aristocracy of the spirit, nobility derives from diametrically opposite sources. The glory of the feudal aristocrat is in being a link in the longest possible chain of ancestors. The glory of the aristocrat of the spirit is in having no ancestors - or having as few as possible. If an artist is his own ancestor, if he has only descendents, he enters history as a genius; if he has few ancestors, or is related to them distantly, he enters history as a talent.

It's clearly possible for a something to acquire higher intelligence than its ancestors: we evolved to be smarter than our ape-like ancestors, and Einstein was smarter than his parents.

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.

Before (the Palestinians) very eyes we are possessing the land and the villages where they and their ancestors have lived We are the generation of colonizers and without the steel helmet and the gun barrel we cannot plant a tree and build a house.

We need to haunt the house of history and listen anew to the ancestors' wisdom.

There is no escape - we pay for the violence of our ancestors.

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

The idea that we are the gods now, and we are doing things that our ancestors think are god-like is not a rhetorical question. You know what I mean? We really are as gods.

None of us can boast about the morality of our ancestors. The record does not show that Adam and Eve were ever married.

Since Serengeti-scale savanna scenes are only one or two million years old, our earliest after-the-apes ancestors didn't move into this scene so much as they evolved with it, as the slower climate changes and uplift produced more grass and less forest.

I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished.

Even though fathers, grandparents, siblings, memories of ancestors are important agents of socialization, our society focuses on the attributes and characteristics of mothers and teachers and gives them the ultimate responsibility for the child's life chances.

If your ancestors cut down all the trees, it’s not your fault, but you still don’t live in a forest.

I promise you the Lord will bless you in your efforts, for this is His work, and He will guide your prayerful efforts to bring the ordinances and covenants to your ancestors....you can make a powerful contribution. Begin now. I promise you that the Lord will help you find a way. And it will make you feel wonderful.

Over millions of years the viruses in our genome mutate more and more so the look less and less and less recognizable as viruses and so if there was a virus that infected our pre mammal ancestors like 250 million years ago, which it probably did, we can't see it because it just looks totally random.

We want to govern with our indigenous ancestors' models: That means a different concept of participation, community work and honesty.

We must not forget that these men and women who file through the narrow gates at Ellis Island, hopeful, confused, with bundles of misconceptions as heavy as the great sacks upon their backs these simple, rough-handed people are the ancestors of our descendants, the fathers and mothers of our children.

We stand on no high moral plateau in our time. We are, in fact, plumbing depths of depravity unknown to our ancestors--and whatever may have been the evil in which they engaged, at least they were willing to acknowledge the principle by which their evil was condemned. We have even turned our back on the principle.

The only reason we write - well, the only reason why I write; maybe I shouldn't generalize - is so that I can find out something about myself. Writers have this narcissistic obsession about how we got to be who we are. I have to understand my ancestors - my father, his mother and her mother - to understand who I am. It all leads back to the narcissistic pleasure of discovering yourself.

Coal, oil and gas are called fossil fuels, because they are mostly made of the fossil remains of beings from long ago. The chemical energy within them is a kind of stored sunlight originally accumulated by ancient plants. Our civilization runs by burning the remains of humble creatures who inhabited the Earth hundreds of millions of years before the first humans came on the scene. Like some ghastly cannibal cult, we subsist on the dead bodies of our ancestors and distant relatives. - Dr. Carl Sagan

Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.

There are more temples across the earth than there have ever been. More people in all the world have felt the Spirit of Elijah move them to record the identities and facts of their ancestors' lives.

My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time.

I know it sounds hard to believe, but habits laid down by our ancestors persist even after the conditions that created those habits have gone away.

As I am from Hawaiʻi, the ocean is part of my culture and who I am. My ancestors were great ocean explorers.

Earthmen are not proud of their ancestors and never invite them round to dinner.

Don't be afraid of StarClan. They will understand about Brokentail. You will be honored by our warrior ancestors for your loyalty toy your Clanmates and for your endless courage. So many cats owe their lives to you. Cinderpelt would have died after her accident if you hadn't tended to her. And when there was greencough, you fought day and night.

The changes in the human condition are uncertain and frequent. Many, on whom fortune has bestowed her favours, may trace their family to a more unprosperous station; and many who are now in obscurity, may look back upon the affluence and exalted rank of their ancestors.

Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors - the dreams of our old men, given them in solemn hours of the night by the Great Spirit; and the visions of our sachems, and is written in the hearts of our people.

He that boasts of his ancestors confesses that he has no virtue of his own. No person ever lived for our honor; nor ought that to be reputed ours, which was long before we had a being; for what advantage can it be to a blind man to know that his parents had good eyes? Does he see one whit the better?

I realize the importance of retelling those stories is so that, one, we don't forget what our ancestors had to do so we can be where we are, and two, to just educate the newer generation. I'm being educated by all these films ['Race' and 'Selma'] and the things I've had the opportunity to be a part of, and kids even younger than me are being educated, too. It's important to make sure those stories never die.

In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our ... nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists, and quacks. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive skepticism of adult science.

What grape to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?

When we respond to threats immediately and take action right away, it's usually the threats that we're hard-wired to respond to, the kinds of things that our ancestors survived.

Baseball, more than any other sport, has a magical way of connecting fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, grandparents and grandchildren and ancestors back down the line. - From The Brooklyn Nine

People who take no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything worthy to be remembered with pride by remote descendants.

We must live in the radiance of tomorrow, as our ancestors have suggested in their tales. For what is yet to come tomorrow has possibilities, and we must think of it, the simplest glimpse of that possibility of goodness. That will be our strength. That has always been our strength.

Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.

By nature's law, every man has a right to seize and retake by force his own property taken from him by another, by force of fraud. Nor is this natural right among the first which is taken into the hands of regular government after it is instituted. It was long retained by our ancestors. It was a part of their common law, laid down in their books, recognized by all the authorities, and regulated as to circumstances of practice.

The liberties of our country, the freedoms of our civil Constitution are worth defending at all hazards; it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors. They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring a mark of everlasting infamy on the present generation – enlightened as it is – if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of designing men.

Our ancestors who changed the world did so through new ideas which came to them as they acted.

The point is that for our ancestors, the universe was a picture; for modern physics it is a story.

Every man is an omnibus in which his ancestors ride.

Our rural ancestors, with little blest, Patient of labor when the end was rest, Indulged the day that housed their annual grain, With feasts, and off'rings, and a thankful strain.

This morning, Tegus welcomed me again with an arm clasp and cheek touch. I wasn't startled this time, and I breathed in at his neck. How can I describe the scent of his skin? He smells something like cinnamon-- brown and dry and sweet and warm. Ancestors, is it wrong for me to imagine laying my head on his chest and closing my eyes and breathing in his smell?

For the white man to ask the black man if he hates him is just like the rapist asking the raped, or the wolf asking the sheep, 'Do you hate me?' The white man is in no moral position to accuse anyone else of hate! Why, when all of my ancestors are snake-bitten, and I'm snake-bitten, and I warn my children to avoid snakes, what does that snake sound like accusing me of hate-teaching?

Do not accept anything simply because it has been said by your teacher, or because it has been written in your sacred books, or because it has been believed by many, or because it has been handed down by your ancestors. Accept and live only according to what will enable you to see truth face to face.