Being Southerners, it was a source of shame to some members of the family that we had no recorded ancestors on either side of the Battle of Hastings.
Ancestors Quotes
I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. Consequently, my family pride is something inconceivable. I can’t help it. I was born sneering.
I don’t know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be.
Some decent, regulated preeminence, some preference given to birth, is neither unnatural nor unjust nor impolite.
It takes at least three generations to be accepted in Ford County. Regardless of money or breeding, one cannot simply move there and be trusted. A dark cloud of suspicion hangs over any newcomer… The people there are exceedingly warm and gracious and polite… They nod and speak to everyone on the downtown streets. They […]
The lesson of the tremendous days through which we are passing is that men cannot live upon the achievements of their forefathers, but must themselves renew them – We cannot escape the elementary facts of life – that for a people there is nothing for nothing, that what they have they must themselves make, that […]
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 […]
