Is anyone simply by birth to be applauded or punished?
It is indeed a desirable thing to be well-descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors.
Mules are always boasting that their ancestors were horses.
My ancestors didn't come over on the Mayflower, but they were there to meet the boat.
No one is better born than another, unless they are born with better abilities and a more amiable disposition.
None of us can boast about the morality of our ancestors. The record does not show that Adam and Eve were ever married.
Nothing is so soothing to our self esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.
Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrations and revolutionists.
Stillness and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding. Vulgar persons can't sit still, or at least must always work their limbs and features.
The kind of ancestors we have had is not as important as the kind of descendants our ancestors have.
The person who has nothing to brag about but their ancestors is like a potato; the best part of them is underground.
The precise form of an individual's activity is determined, of course, by the equipment with which he came into the world. In other words, it is determined by his heredity.
The scholar without good breeding is a nitpicker; the philosopher a cynic; the soldier a brute and everyone else disagreeable.
The sharp thorn often produces delicate roses.
There is a certain class of people who prefer to say that their fathers came down in the world through their own follies than to boast that they rose in the world through their own industry and talents. It is the same shabby-genteel sentiment, the same vanity of birth which makes men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels rather than elevated apes.
They talk about their Pilgrim blood, their birthright high and holy! a mountain-stream that ends in mud thinks is melancholy.
Those who boast of their decent, brag on what they owe to others.
Unworthy offspring brag the most about their worthy descendants.
We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.
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