Ancestral History Quotes

Not to have knowledge of what happened before you were born is to be condemned to live as a child.

When some people look at a shrimp they think, "Hmm. Delicious." When I look at a shrimp I think, "You're a miracle, absolutely incredible. Your ancestors have gone back hundreds of millions of years." And to develop a thing as simple as a shrimp cocktail, you have to calculate the hundreds of millions of years that have preceded that moment where you're sitting there with your sauce and fork poised.

A lot of the questions that anyone would naturally have about their family, you'll get much of the answers for, or at least hints to where it will go, in the future.

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.

As you know, the fossil record includes not only the ancestors of crocodiles and whales, but also the ancestors of human beings. And this, of course, is why evolution remains controversial.

You can't know who you are, as a nation or a people, unless you know where you've been.

The primordial image, or archetype, is a figure--be it a daemon, a human being, or a process--that constantly recurs in the course of history and appears wherever creative fantasy is freely expressed. Essentially, therefore, it is a mythological figure. . . . In each of these images there is a little piece of human psychology and human fate, a remnant of the joys and sorrows that have been repeated countless times in our ancestral history. . . .

So much of the physical world has been explored. But the deluge of data I get to investigate really lets me chart new territory. Genetic data from people living today forms an archaeological record of what happened to their ancestors 10,000 years ago.

Well, everybody has a history.

I kind of embarked on a fruitless search to find information about my character, Frederick Aiken. And it was fruitless, unfortunately, because there's so little about him.

I own a lot of my house, because I'm Irish and from people who never owned anything.

I come from a stupid family. During the civil war my great uncle fought for the west.

I think where you're born brings a history with it - a cultural history, a mythical history, an ancestral history, a religious context - and certainly influences your perception of the world and how you interpret everyday reality.

I carry in my datebook a piece of paper that my mother copied out for me, from the 1840 Census. Hardy Callaway Culver of Hancock County, Georgia, had 42 slaves, 31 "employed in agriculture." Culver was my great-great-great grandfather. I carry this piece of paper with me every day because I don't want to forget. I don't know what to do with the information, but I don't want to forget it.

A man finds room in the few square inches of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.