Nargis Fakhri Quotes

My mother Diana was a true-blue aristocrat, descended from William the Conqueror and listed in 'Burke's Peerage.' My father David, from a poor Scottish family, was a doctor.

My father's father came from Russia; my mother came from Romania.

What is the use of your pedigrees?

My grandparents were from Spain, and I had a Spanish passport.

Great families of yesterday we show, And lords, whose parents were the Lord knows who.

Her mother was a Rutherford. The family came over in the ark, and were connected by marriage with Henry the VIII. On her father's side they date back further than Adam. On the topmost branches of her family tree there's a superior breed of monkeys with very fine silky hair and extra long tails.

It is a great deal easier for a man to find a pedigree to fit his virtues than virtues to fit his pedigree.

Believe me, I didn't think there was some princely family I belonged to.

My family, we're all WASPs.

I am fighting royalty. I have gypsy kings on both sides of the family.

Let wealth and commerce, laws and learning die, But leave us still our old nobility.

Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman loves a pedigree.

Our ideas of the life and business of a soldier were drawn chiefly from the adventures of Ivanhoe and Charles O'Malley, two worthies with whose personal history almost every man in the army was familiar. The men who volunteered went to war of their own accord, and were wholly unaccustomed to acting on any other than their own motion…. Their officers were of themselves, chosen by election, and subject, by custom, to enforced resignation upon petition of the men…. There was one sort of rank, however, which was both maintained and respected from the first, namely, that of social life. The line of demarkation between gentry and common people … rests … upon an indeterminate something or other, known as family. To come of a good family is a patent of nobility, and there is no other way whatever by which any man or any woman can find a passage into the charmed circle.

My father's family is German and Czech.

I'm actually the son of Mary Guibert. My mother was born in the Panama Canal zone and came to America when she was five with my grandmother and grandfather, and that was the family I knew. Everybody sang; everybody had songs all the time, and they loved music.

Both my parents are Italian. My mom was born and raised in Italy. My dad was born in Canada, but then they moved to Italy.

To my astonishment, everything that I had assumed was now questioned by the findings. What started off as a search for identity that appeared to be purely Scottish in origin ended up as a discovery of my migrant roots - indeed an understanding that almost all of our families, at some stage, have been migrants - and my European roots.

I'm Cuban. My parents are immigrants.

I'm child of immigrants.

My grandparents were always farmers.

My stepfather is a baron. He has a castle in Belgium that's been in his family for hundreds and hundreds of years. It's not fancy; it's really sort of brimstone and dark. It's got a moat and a drawbridge.

My children have to know where they come from and the way of life in Africa.

My father was a rags-to-riches businessman who came over in the Sixties with no money. On my mother's side, I am the grandson of a High Court judge and celebrated intelligence officer, so it's quite an unusual combination.

I'm not Chinese, but both of my parents were born in Iran; my brother and I were the first ones born here. First in our family to go to college, that whole thing.

Sometimes in Asian homes it is all about where we've come from, which is important too, but it is about where you live and where you're born and the people who are the same as you.