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My Favorite Genealogy Quotes

• "Why waste your money looking up your family tree? Just go into politics and your opponents will do it for you." -- Mark Twain
  
• "In all of us there is a hunger, marrow deep, to know our heritage - to know who we are and where we came from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness." -- Alex Haley, Roots
  
• "If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten; Either write things worthy of reading, or do things worthy of writing." -- Benjamin Franklin, May 1738
  
• "There are only two lasting bequests we can give our children - one is roots, and the other, wings." -- Hodding S. Carter
  
• "When a society or a civilization perishes, one condition can always be found. They forgot where they came from." -- Carle Sandburg
  
• "I don't know who my grandfather was, I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be." -- Abraham Lincoln
  
• You live as long as you are remembered. -- Russian proverb
  
• "Those who forget their past are destined to repeat it." -- Robert A. Heinlein
  
• "We are the children of many sires, and every drop of blood in us in its turn ... betrays its ancestor." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
  
• "People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors." -- Edmund Burke
  
• "Everyone has ancestors and it is only a question of going back far enough to find a good one." -- Howard Kenneth Nixon
  
• "It is a desirable thing to be well-descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors." -- Plutarch
  
• "Anybody can make history, only a great man can write it." -- Oscar Wilde
  
• "He who has no fools, knaves, or beggars in his family was begot by a flash of lightning." -- Old English proverb
  
• "If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance." -- George Bernard Shaw
  
• "There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his." -- Helen Keller
  
• "Family faces are magic mirrors. Looking at people who belong to us, we see the past, present and future." -- Gail Lumet Buckley
  
• "Genealogy" Tracing yourself back to people better than you are." -- John Garland Pollard
  
• "I don't have to look up my family tree because I know that I'm the sap." -- Fred Allen
  
• "We've uncovered some embarrassing ancestors in the not-too-distant past. Some horse thieves, and some people killed on Saturday nights. One of my relatives, unfortunately, was even in the newspaper business." -- Jimmy Carter