Ancestral Background Quotes

We're Americans. That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country of the world.

Ancestry is most important to those who have done nothing themselves.

Almost any American can connect on some level to a family background of having come across some ocean. They say, 'My great-grandparents came from wherever... this is why we have this last name, why we do this thing at Christmas.' All the details get watered down but don't quite disappear.

We had our family tree done... turns out I'm a quarter gay on my father's side.

My mother was from upstate New York; she's of Irish and German descent. My father was from Ghana.

My family is Abenaki Indian on my mother's side. My father's side of the family is Slovak, and we also have some English ancestry.

I haven't done any genealogical exploring myself, though members of my family and also of my husband's family have traced things back. I have a great grandfather on my mother's side who was a musician, and I'd like to know more about his life.

It's probably worth noting that although I'm ethnically Greek, my grandfather was actually born in Turkey and came through Greece on his way to the United States.

Pride thyself on what virtue thou hast, and not on thy parentage.

Birth and ancestry, and that which we have not ourselves achieved, we can scarcely call our own.

[I'm] more German than Irish.

My mother born in Mexico, but was Lebanese in origin. She born 1902 the same year my father arrived to Mexico when he was 14 years old.

All dwarfs may be bastards yet not all bastards are dwarfs.

The point is, you have an ethnic heritage and you have a human heritage. Your human heritage includes everything of human value.

My last name is originally Irish. I'm not exactly sure whereabouts it's from, but I've got family branches that were traced back there.

The difference between a mongrel and a thoroughbred, whether brute or man, is not in swiftness, beauty, or endurance, but in courage.

My African roots made me what I am today. They're the reason I exist at all.

Pedigree and ancestry and what we ourselves have not achieved, I scarcely recognize as our own.

I was named after my Jewish grandfather who left Poland early in the 20th century. What I knew from an early age was that he had lived most of his life in England, his Jewish wife had died, and he married a non-Jewish woman who was my grandmother.

Through the years, I found we had Native American blood in us. My great-grandmother came from the island of Martinique, and they hooked up with the Native Americans of Louisiana.

It used to be said that, socially speaking, Philadelphia asked who a person is, New York how much is he worth, and Boston what does he know. Nationally it has now become generally recognized that Boston Society has long cared even more than Philadelphia about the first point and has refined the asking of who a person is to the point of demanding to know who he was. Philadelphia asks about a man's parents; Boston wants to know about his grandparents.

I am Michael, and I am part English, Irish, German, and Scottish, sort of a virtual United Nations.

Pedigree matters: if you break your shoulder trying to open a door, it's much harder to play the game once you get in the room.

The past was the past; there was no escaping your beginnings.

I was told all my life I was part Cherokee. Then it was Crow. The latest is Blackfoot.