Family

"Sire, I am my own Rudolph of Hapsburg. (Rudolph was the founder of the Hapsburg family)."

"Sence I've ben here, I've hired a chap to look about for me To git me a transplantable an' thrifty fem'ly-tree."

"Stemmata quid faciunt, quid prodest, Pontice, longo, Sanguine censeri pictosque ostendere vultus."

"Ah, ma foi, je n'en sais rien; moi je suis mon ancetre."

"My nobility," said he, "begins in me, but yours ends in you."

"Fortes creantur fortibus et bonis; Est in juvencis, est in equibus patrum Virtus; nec imbellem feroces Progenerant aquilæ columbam."

"Few sons attain the praise of their great sires, and most their sires disgrace."

"No, my friends, I go (always other things being equal) for the man that inherits family traditions and the cumulative humanities of at least four or five generations."

"Primus Adam duro cum verteret arva ligone, Pensaque de vili deceret Eva colo: Ecquis in hoc poterat vir nobilis orbe videri? Et modo quisquam alios ante locandus erir?"

"Born in a Cellar, * * * and living in a Garret."

"Great families of yesterday we show, And lords whose parents were the Lord knows who."

"D'Adam nous sommes tous enfants, La prouve en est connue, Et que tous, nos premier parents Ont mené la charrue. Mais, las de cultiver enfin La terre labourée, L'une a dételé le matin, L'autre l'après-dinée."

"I came up-stairs into the world; for I was born in a cellar."

"Odiosum est enim, cum a prætereuntibus dicatur:—O domus antiqua, heu, quam dispari dominare domino."

"Born in the garret, in the kitchen bred."

"A degenerate nobleman, or one that is proud of his birth, is like a turnip. There is nothing good of him but that which is underground."

"Some decent regulated pre-eminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth, is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolitic."

"The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice. The possession of family wealth and of the distinction which attends hereditary possessions (as most concerned in it,) are the natural securities for this transmission."

"People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors."

"I look upon you as a gem of the old rock."

"I am a gentleman, though spoiled i' the breeding. The Buzzards are all gentlemen. We came in with the Conqueror."

"The wisdom of our ancestors."

"That is the nature of our ancestors: immensely courageous hunters, defenders, shepherds, voyagers, inventors, warriors, and founders of cities and states. That is the father you could rescue; the ancestor you could become."

"All of them, my ancestors,/blood of my blood,/flame of my flame,/dead and living mixed together,/sad, grotesque, immense./They trample through me as through a dark house./Trampling with prayers, and curses, and wailing,/rattling my heart like a copper bell,/my tongue quivers,/I don't know my own voice-/My ancestors speak."

"Teach them about the detestable things that their ancestors did. ... Abandon your detestable practices. You are not to defile yourselves with Egypt's idols. ... You are not to follow the statutes of your ancestors, observe their ordinances, or be defiled by their idols. I am the LORD your God."

"'Tis happy for him that his father was born before him."

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

"The Smiths never had any arms, and have invariably sealed their letters with their thumbs."

"I make little account of genealogical trees. Mere family never made a man great. Thought and deed, not pedigree, are the passports to enduring fate."

"Our ancestors are very good kind of folks; but they are the last people I should choose to have a visiting acquaintance with."

"Qui genus jactat suum Aliena laudat."

"Stemma non inspicit. Omnes, si ad primam originem revocentur, a Diis sunt."

"Majorum gloria posteris lumen est, neque bona neque mala in occulto patitur."

"On garde toujours la marque de ses origines."

"That all from Adam first begun, None but ungodly Woolston doubts, And that his son, and his son's sons Were all but ploughmen, clowns and louts. Each when his rustic pains began, To merit pleaded equal right, 'Twas only who left off at noon, Or who went on to work till night."

"If there be no nobility of descent, all the more indispensable is it that there should be nobility of ascent,—a character in them that bear rule so fine and high and pure that as men come within the circle of its influence they involuntarily pay homage to that which is the one pre-eminent distinction,—the royalty of virtue."

"What can ennoble sots, or slaves, or cowards? Alas! not all the blood of all the Howards."

"Nam genus et proavos et quæ non fecimus ipsi Vix ea nostra voco."

"Under the contract, the natural mother is irrevocably committed before she knows the strength of her bond with her child. She never makes a totally voluntary, informed decision, for quite clearly any decision prior to the baby's birth is, in the most important sense, uninformed, and any decision after that, compelled by a pre-existing contractual commitment...."

"The surrogacy contract violates the policy of this State that the rights of natural parents are equal concerning their child, the father's right no greater than the mother's. The parent and child relationship extends equally to every child and to every parent, regardless of the marital status of the parents."

"I find my blood pressure rising when Clinton's cultural shock troops participate in homosexual-rights fund-raisers but boycott gun-rights fund-raisers... and then claim it's time to place homosexual men in tents with Boy Scouts, and suggest that sperm donor babies born into lesbian relationships are somehow better served and more loved."

"Are there genetic predispositions to coffee drinking? Highly unlikely. I referred to this kind of donor selection process as grass roots eugenics—where people select donors based upon fuzzy interpretations of genetics, imagining a prototype perfect donor whose desired traits will be passed down to their child. People choose donors with whom they feel they have a connection. If they plan to tell the child how they were conceived, they also want to be able to say good things about the donor who helped create them."

"Screening policies in the human gamete industry reflect larger cultural assumptions that pathologize difference. In my research on both sperm donation in the 1990s up to my current work on egg donation, I have discovered there are a number of reasons a prospective sperm or egg provider may be rejected: too short, too tall, overweight, “socially inappropriate,” not having the “right motivations,” not attractive enough, a variety of “health reasons,” possibly even religion or ethnicity, and so on. The reasons for rejecting a potential donor are often unspoken."

"The London Sperm Bank recently came under public scrutiny for rejecting a prospective sperm donor because he’s dyslexic. Aside from dyslexia, this repository also screens out men seeking to donate sperm if they have ADHD, dyspraxia, Asperger’s and other neurological conditions, many of which have a demonstrated genetic link. On the company’s website, these traits were listed as “neurological diseases,” along with Cerebral Palsy, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Epilepsy, Tourette Syndrome and Multiple Sclerosis."

"Dr. David Wheeler: ...easiest thing in the world, being a teenager: you get up, you go to school, you come home, and you do your homework. How do you mess that up? Yet all of you did, in one way or another ― and now I have to clean up that mess!"

"I make movies for teenage boys. Oh, dear, what a crime."

"I'll tell you what would really age me fast: if I had a teenaged daughter. I don't think I could handle that. Because that would mean teenaged boys would be coming around to my house. "Hi, Mr. Barry!" they'd say, with their cheerful, innocent young voices. "We're here to have sex with your daughter!" No, of course they wouldn't come out and say that, but I know that's what they'd be thinking, because I was a teenaged boy once, and I was basically a walking hormone storm. I'm sure modern boys are no different. So if I had a teenaged daughter, and a boy came to my house, after somehow picking his way through the land mines in the lawn, I'd probably lunge through the screen door and strangle him right there ("Hi, Mr. Barry! Is Jennifer heAAAAAAAWWWWK"). You think I'm exaggerating, but I have male friends whose daughters are approaching puberty at speeds upwards of 700 miles per hour, and when you say the word "dating," my friends get a look in their eyes that makes Charles Manson look like Captain Kangaroo."

"With the social and ethical context of the transformations of adolescence as the centrepiece of her chapter, Amanda Howell in "Coming of Age, With Vampires" gives voice to the figure of teenager as the Other in society. Comparing three cinematic and television productions (Lost Boys, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Let the Right One In, and engaging with the metaphor of threshold crossings, the author stresses the role of the vampire trope in negotiating the cultural angst and challenges associated with puberty. Of particular interest to this discussion is how adolescent protagonists face an untested freedom and unaccustomed responsibility for the self which entails the challenge of consent."

"As a teenager you are at the last stage in your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you."

"Betty, who substituted at the middle school, like to say that there was really no such thing as a thirteen-year-old, but inside every eighth grader were a ten-year-old and a sixteen-year-old locked in mortal combat. Given enough time, the big kid would win and ask to borrow the car. Meanwhile, according to Betty, the best Faith could do was to silently chant the mother’s mantra: “It’s only a phase, it’s only a phase.”"