Descendant Quotations

Every outbreak across the globe today stems from a descendant of the medieval plague.

Of course, everyone in the New World is an immigrant or a descendant of immigrants, and immigrants have built America and continue to do so. Legal or illegal, they are almost universally good people who work to better their lot and that of their children.

I am, of course, directly descended from Brian Boru, the last king of Ireland, a fact certified by my mother and therefore beyond dispute. But as everybody else with a drop of Irish blood in his carcass is also a guaranteed descendant of the old billy goat, I am not overly arrogant because of this royal strain.

The seventeenth-century baby slept, as his nineteenth-century descendant does, in a cradle. Nothing could be prettier than the old cradles that have survived successive years of use with many generations of babies.

I am a fourth-generation descendant of the Sand Creek Massacre. My great-grandmother and great-grandfather were here during the attack, and they survived it. It's a special place for us, and I am happy that legislation to make this an historic site has passed.

My maternal grandmother had what might be described in a school report as a 'lively imagination.' She told us that she was a direct descendant of Sir Christopher Wren.

Jefferson's religion has been a question mark for some time, but a descendant of his who did thorough research came to the conclusion that Jefferson was a conservative Unitarian. That's accurate. In church attendance, Jefferson probably led the pack. He liked church going and he liked to listen to speeches, he really was a devout man. When his daughter died his other daughter found him off by himself reading the Bible.

PEDIGREE, n. The known part of the route from an arboreal ancestor with a swim bladder to an urban descendant with a cigarette.

I'm the descendant of enslaved black people in this country. You could've been born in 1820 if you were black and looked back to your ancestors and saw nothing but slaves all the way back to 1619. Look forward another 50 or 60 years and saw nothing but slaves.

The lawyer refused to tell me my brother's name, and my colleagues started a betting pool. The leading candidate: John Travolta. I secretly hoped for a literary descendant of Henry James - someone more talented than I: someone brilliant without even trying.