A. J. Jacobs Quotes

I think it's really important to teach our children about their lineage and it especially makes a difference if you share that information while they're young.

My ancestors are all crazy. My great-great-granddad, he was the last man to live in a cave in Nottingham.

To understand and reconnect with our stories, the stories of the ancestors, is to build our identities.

I lived among the Japanese, and saw their mode of living, in regions unaffected by European contact.

Ritual is important to us as human beings. It ties us to our traditions and our histories.

There's a line that runs between everyone and their ancestors, and you cannot sever that. Maybe disassociate from those ideas but not how you are connected to them. But, you can realise how you've benefited and change how you raise your kids.

I'm connected with my indigenous roots.

I've danced hula since I was 5. My mom danced hula as well. It's been in my family from far back and really connected me to my ancestors.

We all have to appreciate where we come from and how wonderful our parents were.

I come from a middle-class South Indian family, and we speak Tulu at home. I never led a lavish life, and I have my feet on the ground.

Oddly enough, my mother was born in Southampton. I have roots in Southampton, Bridgehampton, Sag Harbor. My grandfather, her father, Stefano Rullo, when he came from Naples, he went to Pennsylvania and worked coal mines.

Thousand years ago, we all descended from Africans who left the continent. Those ancestors, we will never know their name. We can go back 200 or 300 years and actually populate your family tree with real people who had names and documents. They had customs, characteristics that, unbeknownst to you, you have inherited. Almost through osmosis it has been passed down to you.

It was always so important to my dad for us to understand about the Genocide and to know about our family history.

Now we have this idea that, not only do you go to first grade to learn your family's language, but you go to a university to learn about the person you were before you left home.

I think I'm fascinated with history and - just in general. And I'm always interested in how did - how did this come to be? Why is this the way it is? And even singing classical voice, I quickly became more and more interested with early music, baroque voice. And that became an obsession to me - just figuring out how - who are the ancestors of whatever it is.

It's time for Black people to stop playing the separating game of geography, of where the slave ship put us down. We must concentrate on where the slave ship picked us up.

One of the ways of helping to destroy a people is to tell them they don't have a history that they have no roots.

I think it's good to look at how people lived before, and then take the best bits of that culture and try to mix it in with your own.

In fact, every one of us - every nation, every individual begins hundreds, perhaps thousands of years prior to the date that appears in the passport.

I feel that history is in many ways the most important of all subjects because it is about everything and because it's about who we are and how we came to be the way we are.

I believe in racial memory too. I'm sure I've got ancient African blood in me that has something to do with what I am.

A love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril.

A man is the sum of his ancestors; to reform him you must begin with a dead ape and work downward through a million graves.

I live in a town that's two and a half hours from the border. I know people who have lived in San Antonio for generations, sometimes seven generations, their families are from there, and they are of Mexican descent, and they've never gone farther than the border.

It is important that we know where we come from, because if you do not know where you come from, then you don't know where you are, and if you don't know where you are, you don't know where you're going. And if you don't know where you're going, you're probably going wrong.