| Author |
Quotes |
| Alexander Pope | What can ennoble sots, or slaves, or cowards? Alas! not all the blood, of all the Howards. |
| Daniel Defoe | Great families of yesterday we show, And lords whose parents were the Lord knows who. |
| Edmund Burke | People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors. |
| Edmund Burke | Some decent regulated pre-eminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth, is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolite. |
| Francis Bacon | The wisdom of our ancestors. |
| George Bernard Shaw | If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance. |
| Helen Keller | There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his. |
| Homer | Few sons attain the praise Of their great sires and most their sires disgrace. |
| Horatius Flaccus | The brave are born from the brave and good. In steers and in horses is to be found the excellence of their sire; nor do savage eagles produce a peaceful dove. |
| Iphicrates | "My nobility," said he, "begins in me, but yours ends in you." - Iphicrates, |
| James Russell Lowell | Sence I've ben here, I've hired a chap to look about for me, To git me a transplantable an' thrifty fem'ly-tree. |
| Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr | No, my friends, I go for the man that inherits family traditions and the cumulative humanities of at least four or five generations. |
| Ovidius Naso | Birth and ancestry, and that which we have not ourselves achieved, we can scarcely call our own. |
| Piers Anthony | We are all creatures of our ancestry! There is no right and wrong, objectively. |
| Richard Brome | I am a gentleman, though spoiled i' the breeding. The Buzzards are all gentlemen. We came with the Conqueror. |
| Samuel Butler | A degenerate nobleman, or one that is proud of his birth, is like a turnip. There is nothing good of him but that which is underground. |
| Samuel Foote | Born is a Cellar, . . . and living in a Garret. |
| Seneca | He who boasts of his ancestry praises the merits of another. |
| Sir Thomas Browne | I look upon you as a gem of the old rock. |
| Sir Thomas Overbury | The man who has not anything to boast of but his illustrious ancestors is like a potato,--the only good belonging to him is under ground. |
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