Ancestry

(179 votes)   Unworthy offspring brag the most about their worthy descendants.

Danish Proverbs
Sayings of Danish Origin

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(171 votes)   Mules are always boasting that their ancestors were horses.

German Proverbs
Sayings of German Origin

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(156 votes)   The kind of ancestors we have had is not as important as the kind of descendants our ancestors have.

Source Unknown

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(155 votes)   Clever father, clever daughter; clever mother, clever son.

Russian Proverbs
Sayings of Russian Origin

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(154 votes)   Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman loves a pedigree.

George Bernard Shaw
1856-1950, Irish-born British Dramatist

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(148 votes)   High birth is an accident, not a virtue.

Pietro Metastasio
1698-1782, Italian Poet

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(145 votes)   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.

W. Winwood Reade
1838-1875, American Writer

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(140 votes)   Is anyone simply by birth to be applauded or punished?

Hitopadesa
600?-1100? AD, Sanskrit Fable From Panchatantra

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(137 votes)   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

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(137 votes)   They talk about their Pilgrim blood, their birthright high and holy! a mountain-stream that ends in mud thinks is melancholy.

James Russell Lowell
1819-1891, American Poet, Critic, Editor

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(134 votes)   Good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803-1882, American Poet, Essayist

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(132 votes)   In church your grandsire cut his throat; to do the job too long he tarried: he should have had my hearty vote to cut his throat before he married.

Jonathan Swift
1667-1745, Anglo-Irish Satirist

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(132 votes)   The scholar without good breeding is a nitpicker; the philosopher a cynic; the soldier a brute and everyone else disagreeable.

Lord Chesterfield
1694-1773, British Statesman, Author

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(113 votes)   If your descent is from heroic sires, show in your life a remnant of their fires.

Nicholas Boileau
1636-1711, French Literary Poet, Critic

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(111 votes)   A man is his own best ancestor.

Tiberius
Roman emperor

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