Cuba Gooding Jr. Quotes

All of the guests on 'Faces of America' were deeply moved by what we revealed about their ancestry. We were able to trace the ancestry of Native American writer Louise Erdrich back to 438 A.D. We found that Queen Noor is descended from royalty, and that's before she married King Hussein of Jordan.

My great-great-grandfather was a shah back in the 1800s. Unfortunately, I don't have any gold coins or jewels to show for it.

I come from a family of servants. My father's father was a servant, and my father's father's father was a slave.

Let us make future generations remember us as proud ancestors just as, today, we remember our forefathers.

People will not look forward to posterity who are not anxious to look backward to their ancestry

I am the descendant of slaves, of people that were born from a slave and a slave master.

I always had my roots in the past.

History has always fascinated me. Coming from a family that has it's own regal history, I always like places that have a rich past.

We are the children of many sires, and every drop of blood in us in its turn betrays its ancestor.

A statesman is a politician who’s been dead ten or fifteen years.

The gentleman will please remember that when his half-civilized ancestors were hunting wild boar in Silesia, mine were princes of the earth.

I am not myself, I am the result of all my ancestors.

The unexpressed aim of every politician is to influence events that history books will record his name - and spell it right.

I am in blood and power better than the best of them …. My ancestors were kings of Ulster. Ulster was theirs and shall be mine.

As you get older, you get more... genealogical.

I was Everett LeRoi Jones. My grandfather's name was Everett.

All of our ancestors came from somewhere.

I live in the county where my mother was born and buried.

To live in Portsmouth without possessing a family portrait done by Copley is like living in Boston without having an ancestor in the old Granary Burying-Ground. You can exist, but you cannot be said to flourish.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

The same way one tells a recipe, one tells a family history. Each one of us has our past locked inside.

Blue Ivy can say she knows who her great-great-great-great-grandfather is. How many people can say that?

To speak about yourself, you must first be able to assemble a sense of origin. For descendants of slaves, this has proved one of the most precious losses of self-knowledge we've endured.

I have goals, I have my purpose. I want to build upon what my grandpa and my dad and my stepdad did in the past.

If I can go three grandmothers back and find a slave, that means someone else can go three grandmothers back and find a slave owner. When you interrogate your histories, it forces you to rethink who you are and where you are.