I don't have to look up my family tree, because I know that I'm the sap.
~ Fred A. Allen

Genealogy. An account of one's descent from an ancestor who did not particularly care to trace his own.
~ Ambrose Bierce

If your descent is from heroic sires, show in your life a remnant of their fires.
~ Nicholas Boileau

Nothing is so soothing to our self esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.
~ Van Wyck Brooks

Heredity is nothing, but stored environment.
~ Luther Burbank

Good breeding is the result of good sense, some good nature, and a little self-denial for the sake of others.
~ Lord Chesterfield

The scholar without good breeding is a nitpicker; the philosopher a cynic; the soldier a brute and everyone else disagreeable.
~ Lord Chesterfield

Breed is stronger than pasture.
~ George Eliot

Good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule.
~ W. S. Gilbert

Is anyone simply by birth to be applauded or punished?
~ Hitopadesa

Every man is an omnibus in which his ancestors ride.
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

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.
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

None of us can boast about the morality of our ancestors. The record does not show that Adam and Eve were ever married.
~ Edgar Watson Howe

I don't know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be.
~ Abraham Lincoln

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.
~ Henry Louis

They talk about their Pilgrim blood, their birthright high and holy! a mountain-stream that ends in mud thinks is melancholy.
~ James Russell Lowell

High birth is an accident, not a virtue.
~ Pietro Metastasio

We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.
~ Joyce Carol Oates

The person who has nothing to brag about but their ancestors is like a potato; the best part of them is underground.
~ Sir Thomas Overbore