Judah P. Benjamin Quotes

I was born into a very important family in Japan. My grandfather was a descendant of the Emperor, and we were very wealthy.

Technically, I'm a knight. My family goes back a thousand years in the Naples area. We're a titled, noble people.

Fransisco, you're some kind of very high nobility, aren't you?" He answered, "Not yet. The reason my family has lasted for such a long time is that none of us has ever been permitted to think he is born a d'Anconia. We are expected to become one.

I'm from such an old family, it's been condemned.

Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch-hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Barontage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; . . .

Those who have nothing else to recommend them to the respect of others but only their blood, cry it up at a great rate, and have their mouth perpetually full of it. They swell and vapor, and you are sure to hear of their families and relations every third word.

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 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 that has been here for almost 200 years. My ancestors started a very dangerous gunpowder business in 1802, and my great- grandfather and his father were both killed in gunpowder explosions.

Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentlemen were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.

What is the use of your pedigrees?

Do the adherents of this mad theory [Evolution] realize the disgrace they are bringing on the most respectable families! There is not an aristocracy in Europe or America that can stand it one moment. For aristocracy is based on the greatness of forefathers…. With a monkey in the background, how can even a Hapsburg or a Guelf put on airs of superiority? How must he hide his face in shame to think, that, as his line lengthens into an obscure antiquity, the foreheads of his house slope, and their jaws project; that he has literally been all his life aping aristocracy, instead of being the real thing; and that, when he has reached his true beginning, his only consolation must be found in the fact that his great skulking, hulking, gibbering baboon of an ancestor rejoices, like himself, in the possession of "the third lobe," "the posterior cornu of the lateral ventricle," and "the hippocampus minor.

Don't call me 'sir; 'King Jew' will do fine.

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.

I learned that not only am I a descendant of slaves, but that I am also a descendant of royalty, that there are politicians from the 1800s as well as Tuskegee Airmen in my lineage.

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.

Am I not sensitive, clever, well-mannered, considerate, passionate, charming, as kind as I'm handsome and heir to a throne?

Though you be sprung in direct line from Hercules, if you show a lowborn meanness, that long succession of ancestors whom you disgrace are so many witnesses against you; and this grand display of their tarnished glory but serves to make your ignominy more evident.

It is the highest of earthly honors to be descended from the great and good. They alone cry out against a noble ancestry who have none of their own.

The nobly born must nobly meet his fate.

Of what use are pedigrees, or to be thought of noble blood, or the display of family portraits, O Ponticus?

Today nobility is gone: there is only a peerage.

The inheritance of a distinguished and noble name is a proud inheritance to him who lives worthily of it.