The reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous sentiment. Their merit was not to reverence the old, but to honor the present moment; and we falsely make them excuses of the very habit which they hated and defied. Ralph Waldo Emerson 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

Man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start. Ralph Waldo Emerson

The equilibrium you admire in me is an unstable one, difficult to maintain. My inner life was split early between the call of the Ancestors and the call of Europe, between the exigencies of black-African culture and those of modern life. Leopold Senghor

The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; . . . We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors. . . [they] transmitted them to us with care and diligence. Samuel Adams

We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestor's dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies. ~Shirley Abbott Distinguished ancestors shed a powerful light on their descendants, and forbid the concealment either of their merits or of their demerits. Gaius Sallustius Crispus

Possessed a right, which nature has given to all men, of departing from the country in which chance, not choice has placed them. Thomas Jefferson