“Roots is not just a saga of my family. It is the symbolic saga of a people.”

— Alex Haley

A plausible statement, but no published source as yet located for it prior to 2007, and though most cite Haley as the author the earliest of these cites it with an obscure attribution to "Benhur R".[citation needed]
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Alex Haley 22

African American biographer, screenwriter, and novelist 1921–1992

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Freud to Paul: The Stages of Auden’s Ideology”, p. 155
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“The real story of how the west was won bears little resemblance to the storybook accounts handed down to generations of young Americans. Behind the facade of frontier heroism and cowboy bravado, of civilizing forces and homespun values, lies a quite different tale: a saga of ecocide and genocide, of forced enclosures of land and people, and the expropriation of an entire subcontinent for the exclusive benefit of a privileged few.”

Jeremy Rifkin book Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture

Source: Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (1992), p. 107

“Oh, yeah, insanity ran deep in the roots of that family tree.’ (Talon)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon Night Embrace

Source: Night Embrace

“Natural law is not applicable to the unseen world behind the symbols, because it is unadapted to anything except symbols, and its perfection is a perfection of symbolic linkage. You cannot apply such a scheme to the parts of our personality which are not measurable by symbols any more than you can extract the square root of a sonnet.”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

Source: Science and the Unseen World (1929), Ch. V, p.53

“I think I am a nice person. People that know me, like me. Does my family like me? I think so, right. Look at my family. I'm proud of my family.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2015, Presidential Bid Announcement (June 16, 2015)

“These people make my family look easy to get along with.”

Megan Whalen Turner The King of Attolia

Source: The King of Attolia

“The events of the past one and one-half years have gripped the whole German people and affected them deeply. It seems almost like a dream that out of the valley of misery, hopelessness, hate, and fragmentation we have found our way back to a German national community. The horrendous tensions in which we have lived since the August days of 1914 have dissolved, and out of this discord, the German soul has emerged once again, before which the glorious and yet so painful history of our people pass in review, from the sagas of the German heroes to the trenches of Verdun, and even to the street fights of our time.”

Franz von Papen (1879–1969) German chancellor

Marburg speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marburg_speech (June 1934), as quoted in The Nazi Germany Sourcebook: An Anthology of Texts. p. 170. Editors Roderick Stackelberg, Sally A. Winkle. Editor Routledge, 2013 ISBN 1134596936.
1930s