Ancestry Quotes - Page 6

• The Afrocentric exploration of the black past only scratches the surface. A full examination of the ancestry of those who are referred to in the newspapers as blacks and African Americans must include Europe and Native America.

  Ishmael Reed

  Past, Europe, America

  Ishmael Reed (1995). “Airing Dirty Laundry”, Perseus Books

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• We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard.

  Penelope Lively

  Latin, Museums, Lexicon

  Penelope Lively (2007). “Moon Tiger”, p.38, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Art photography, although long since legitimized by all the conventional discourses of fine art, seems destined perpetually to recapitulate all the rituals of the arriviste. Inasmuch as one of those rituals consists of the establishment of suitable ancestry, a search for distinguished bloodlines, it inevitably happens that photographic history and criticism are more concern with notions of tradition and continuity than with those of rupture and change.

  Abigail Solomon-Godeau

  Photography, Art, Long

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• While visiting places in the South with my heart really open, I realized how important people in certain geographical spots were to me, what they symbolize, how I'm still connected to them and how much they are a part of my ancestry, both musical and real.

  Rosanne Cash

  Real, Heart, People

  Interview with Kristi York Wooten, www.marandapleasantmedia.com. 2014.

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• Being a mixed-blood person of Ojibway and European ancestry, I always found that I only heard one side of the story - that was the conquerers' side, the side of the French Jesuit missionaries that came to live in what is now Ontario.

  Joseph Boyden

  Blood, Ontario, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I was on the wrong side of colonization. My ancestry is mostly mired in having the colonial experience as colonized subjects, first as slaves and then as independent subjects with a post-colonial experience.

  Fred D'Aguiar

  Independent, Firsts, Sides

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The original mixed ancestry of the Jews and their subsequent history of intermixture with every people among whom they have lived and continue to live.

  Ashley Montagu

  People, Jew, Originals

  Ashley Montagu, (2013). “Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race”, p.223, Read Books Ltd

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• Women are outperforming men in almost every sphere of life in our society and the women of East Indian ancestry are no exception to this rule. They have broken the cultural mould.

  Kamla Persad-Bissessar

  Men, Broken, East

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• I do have a muse. I am not sure how to describe her. She can be very elusive. She was born in England but has Mediterranean ancestry.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  England, Muse, Born

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• Every sentence has its drumbeat. rhythm is one of the most powerful dimensions of language: it separates tribes, united families, soothes children, and shocks us into new awarenesses. Every good writer, marching to his or her own drumbeat, marks out a vibrational field as home territory. The cadences of our sentences carry echos of ancestry and influence as surely as the double helix that orchstrates the life of the body.

  Marilyn Chandler McEntyre

  Children, Powerful, Home

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• Laughter to begin with was probably glee at the misfortunes of others. The baring of the teeth in laughter hints at its savage ancestry. Animals have no malice, hence also no laughter. They never savor the sudden glory of Schadenfreude. It was its infectious quality that made of laughter a medium of mutuality.

  Eric Hoffer

  Laughter, Animal, Quality

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• Unite all people of African ancestry of the world to one great body to establish a country and absolute government of their own.

  Marcus Garvey

  Country, Government, People

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• I believe that the essence of government lies with unceasing concern for the welfare and dignity and decency and innate integrity of life for every individual. I dont like to say this and wish I didnt have to add these words to make it clear but I willregardless of color, creed, ancestry, sex or age.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Sex, Lying, Integrity

  Civil Rights Symposium Address, delivered 12 December 1972. Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Austin, TX

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• The function of the artist is to disturb. His duty is to arouse the sleeper, to shake the complacent pillars of the world. He reminds the world of its dark ancestry, and shows the world its present and points the way to its new birth. He is at once the product and preceptor of his times.

  Norman Bethune

  Dark, Artist, Way

  1937 Letter from Madrid, 5 May. Quoted in Ted Allen and Sydney Gordon The Scalpel, The S word (1952).

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• It was the saying of a great man, that if we could trace our descents, we should find all slaves to come from princes, and all princes from slaves; and fortune has turned all things topsy-turvy in a long series of revolutions; beside, for a man to spend his life in pursuit of a title, that serves only when he dies to furnish out an epitaph, is below a wise man's business.

  Seneca the Younger

  Wise, Men, Long

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• My life shall be free and broad and great, and I will not be the slave to the sense delights which chained my ancient ancestry. I reject the heritage. I break the entail. And who are you to say I am unwise?

  Jack London

  Heritage, Delight, Ancient

  Jack London (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Jack London (Illustrated)”, p.467, Delphi Classics

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• The theory of evolution explains to us what our ancestry has been. It does not explain away our worth. Why should we be afraid to learn more about what we are?

  Philip Kitcher

  Theory Of Evolution, Doe, Should

  Philip Kitcher (1982). “Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism”, p.202, MIT Press

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• The principle on which this country was founded and by which it has always been governed is that Americanism is a matter of the mind and heart; Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race or ancestry.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Country, Heart, Race

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• It is indeed a striking proof of the essential soundness of the tradition that with which all these thousands of copies, tracing their ancestry back to so many different parts of the earth and to conditions of such diverse kinds, the variations of text are so entirely questions of detail, not of essential substance.

  Frederic G. Kenyon

  Earth, Essentials, Details

  "The Story Of The Bible" by Frederic G. Kenyon. Ch. X, The Position Today, p. 136, 1949.

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• Muslim citizens should never be classified according to their creed, origin, ancestry or culture. After all, I don't define my political or social position by reference to the Christian faith.

  Gilles Kepel

  Christian, Political, Culture

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• The theater, when it is potent enough to deserve its ancestry, is always dangerous; that is why it is instinctively feared by people who do not want change, but only preservation of the status quo.

  Hallie Flanagan

  People, Want, Enough

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• The glory of ancestors sheds a light around posterity; it allows neither good nor bad qualities to remain in obscurity.
  [Lat., Majorum gloria posteris lumen est, neque bona neque mala in occulto patitur.]

  Sallust

  Light, Quality, Bad Qualities

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• The question before us is, whether people of African ancestry compose a portion of this people, and are constituent members of this sovereignty? We think they are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.

  Roger Brooke Taney

  War, Thinking, Rights

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• This reference to the Scots side of her ancestry is the first of two visual explorations into Tori Amos's diverse cultural past. As is the case for many of us, Tori's ancestry is a mix of races and religions, philosophies and professions, fortunes and foibles. What to some may seem like a family tree grown wild and untamed is actually a mighty oak that has weathered life's many storms and can still put out a rare and beautiful blossom like Tori.

  Kevyn Aucoin

  Beautiful, Philosophy, Past

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• Wealth is also defined by family, connection to our ancestry, and our best vision of the future. All of these find their inner spirit, their constancy, and their strength in the values that shape our thinking and our actions.

  Nainoa Thompson

  Thinking, Visions Of The Future, Connections

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