My first advice (on how not to grow old) would be to choose your ancestors carefully. Although both my parents died young, I have done well in this respect as regards my other ancestors. My maternal grandfather, it is true, was cut off in the flower of his youth, at the age of sixty-seven, but […]
Ancestors Quotes
Send your noble blood to market and see what it will buy.
You’ve got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was.
One who is proud of ancestry is like a turnip; there is nothing good of him but that which is underground.
Every man is his own ancestor, and every man his own heir. He devises his own fortune, and he inherits his own past.
Some men by ancestry are only the shadow of a mighty name.
What we shall some day become will grow inexorably out of what today we are; and what we are now, in its turn, comes out of what earlier Americans were – out of what they did and thought and dreamed and hoped for, out of their trials and their aspirations, out of their shining victories […]
I know the evil of my ancestors because I am those people. The balance is delicate in the extreme. I know that few of you who read my words have ever thought about your ancestors this way. It has not occurred to you that your ancestors were survivors and that the survival itself sometimes involved […]
One of the best things people could do for their descendents would be to sharply limit the number of them.
If you could see your ancestors, all standing in a row, there might be some among them whom you wouldn’t care to know. But there’s another matter, which requires a different view; if you could see your ancestors, would they be proud of you?
