It's not your blue blood, your pedigree or your college degree. It's what you do with your life that counts.
PEDIGREE, n. The known part of the route from an arboreal ancestor with a swim bladder to an urban descendant with a cigarette. - Ambrose Bierce
Academic pedigree alone is no guarantor of useful knowledge and wisdom. - Robert Samuelson
Liberty of imagination should be the most precious possession of a novelist. To try voluntarily to discover the fettering dogmas of its own inspiration, is a trick worthy of humna perverseness which, after inventing an absurdity, endeavours to find for it a pedigree of distinguished ancestors... - Joseph Conrad