A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.
Edmund Burke

Any living cell carries with it the experience of a billion years of experimentation by its ancestors.
Max Delbruck

As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved Echo of our ancestors, the virgin America, has been abandoned. We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves.
Daniel J. Boorstin

Big cities are chaotic. And chaos for humans - who have experience from their ancestors - is the last step before conflict. So, in the park, every kind of visual contradiction has been eliminated.
John Hench

But it is obvious that our fathers, whose efforts have planted these great and prosperous cities along the once lonely trails of our own broad land, received all the fundamentals of civilization as a heritage from their European ancestors.
James H. Breasted

Crafts make us feel rooted, give us a sense of belonging and connect us with our history. Our ancestors used to create these crafts out of necessity, and now we do them for fun, to make money and to express ourselves.
Phyllis George

Distinguished ancestors shed a powerful light on their descendants, and forbid the concealment either of their merits or of their demerits.
Sallust

Do well and you will have no need for ancestors.
Voltaire

Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.
Richard Dawkins

Gentility is what is left over from rich ancestors after the money is gone.
John Ciardi

Humans are upsetting a fragile balance that their own human ancestors established.
Joan D. Vinge

I admire our ancestors, whoever they were. I think the first self-conscious person must have shaken in his boots. Because as he becomes self-conscious, he's no longer part of nature. He sees himself against nature. He looks at the vastness of the universe and it looks hostile.
John Shelby Spong

I come from a family that has been here for almost 200 years. My ancestors started a very dangerous gunpowder business in 1802, and my great- grandfather and his father were both killed in gunpowder explosions.
Pete du Pont

I have often noticed that ancestors never boast of the descendants who boast of ancestors. I would rather start a family than finish one. Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.
Don Marquis

I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors.
Thomas B. Macaulay

I think these people have betrayed or have forgotten their ancestors.
Zhu Rongji

I, too, am convinced that our ancestors came from Africa.
Richard Leakey