Quotes about Ancestry

What then can we say that Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh, has found? Romans 4:1

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

Each individual has a subconscious memory of the green earth and murmuring waters, and blindness and deafness cannot rob him of this gift from past generations. This inherited capacity is a sort of sixth sense- a soul sense which sees, hears, and feels, all in one.

All of our people all over the country—except the pure-blooded Indians—are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, including even those who came over here on the Mayflower.

Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.

There is divine beauty in learning, just as there is human beauty in tolerance. To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps. The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, their quests. And so are you.

I have learned to hate every drop of white rapist blood that is in me

I walk in Nature's way until I shall lie down and rest, breathing my last in this from which I draw my daily breath, and lying down on this from which my father drew his vital seed, my mother her blood, my nurse her milk; from which for so many years I am fed and watered day by day; which bears my footstep and my misusing it for so many purposes.

how was a man to be explained unless you at least knew somebody who knew his father and mother?

India is, the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grandmother of tradition. Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured ... in India only.

Five months later, July 28, he married the beautiful Sarah Pierrepont, then seventeen, the daughter of the Rev. James Pierrepont, of New Haven, one of the founders, and a prominent trustee, of Yale College, and on her mother's side, the great-granddaughter of Thomas Hooker, "the father of the Connecticut churches.

The rich world of his ancestors set the standards for Dietrich Bonhoeffer's own life. It gave him a certainty of judgment and manner that cannot be acquired in a single generation.