When you start about family, about lineage and ancestry…

It is worthwhile for anyone to have behind him a few generations of honest, hard-working ancestry.

— Anonymous

Blood is a destiny. One's genius descends in the stream from long lines of ancestry.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr

My life shall be free and broad and great, and I will not be the slave to the sense delights which chained my ancient…

— Jack London

High birth is an accident, not a virtue.

— Pietro Metastasio

Being a mixed-blood person of Ojibway and European ancestry, I always found that I only heard one side of the story - that was…

— Joseph Boyden

Bird taxonomy is a difficult field because of the severe anatomical constraints imposed by flight. There are only so many ways to design a…

— Jared Diamond

I've got German, Cornish and Scottish ancestry. It might help explain my affinity for forests, the sea, and fatty foods.

— Kyle MacLachlan

“I have always found it difficult not to be moved by Jerusalem, even when I hated it—and God knows I have hated it for…

— Susan Abulhawa

I've never felt grounded because of my ancestry or my gender. I think until women get away from that they're not going to be…

— Patti Smith

I get anxious. That lovely Jewish guilt that comes with ancestry.

— Maya Rudolph

The function of the artist is to disturb. His duty is to arouse the sleeper, to shake the complacent pillars of the world. He…

— Norman Bethune

Both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.

— Herman Melville

I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across…

— Anonymous

“Ancestry is not destiny,”

— Eric Weiner

…Even the idea of a city never entered his mind. It was as if he had walked under the millimeter of haze just above…

— Michael Ondaatje