Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I have no plans to slow down. "

Henry Louis Gates

Related Quotes:

" For as long as I can remember, I have been passionately intrigued by 'Africa,' by the word itself, by its flora and fauna, its topographical diversity and grandeur; but above all else, by the sheer variety of the colors of its people, from tan and sepia to jet and ebony. "

Henry Louis Gates

" So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history. "

Henry Louis Gates

" I knew that there were black people in Africa, of course, unfortunately because of movies such as 'Tarzan.' "

Henry Louis Gates

" The Western stereotype of Africa and its black citizens as devoid of reason and, therefore, subhuman was often shared by white master and black ex-slave alike. "

Henry Louis Gates

" In America there is institutional racism that we all inherit and participate in, like breathing the air in this room - and we have to become sensitive to it. "

Henry Louis Gates

" I'm a tech geek. Whenever I read about something new, I think to myself, How can I take this and make it black? "

Henry Louis Gates

" The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up. "

Henry Louis Gates

" What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories. "

Henry Louis Gates

" Brazil is the second blackest nation in the world. "

Henry Louis Gates

" You notice patterns. White guests often are mortified - that word again - when they learn their ancestors owned slaves. But I've never had a black guest who was upset to learn about white ancestry that probably involved forced sexual relations. "

Henry Louis Gates

" In fact, the class divide in the black community is now seen by some as a permanent aspect of our existence. "

Henry Louis Gates

" The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of black suffering, some of them self-inflicted. Why can't black leaders organize rallies around responsible sexuality, birth within marriage, parents reading to their children and students staying in school and doing homework? "

Henry Louis Gates

" One principle I've been fighting for that doesn't endear me to a lot of people is that black people can be just as complicated and screwed up as white people. Our motives can be just as base and violent. Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you. "

Henry Louis Gates

" My father and I made genetics history. We were the first African-Americans and the first father and son anywhere to have their genomes sequenced. "

Henry Louis Gates

" Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique. When you're willing to stand up within the group and say, 'It is wrong for Black people to be anti-Semitic,' or 'It is wrong for America to discriminate against persons of African descent and made them slaves and based its wealth upon free labor,' it's crucial to say that. "

Henry Louis Gates

" Because Lincoln is so closely identified with what it is to be American, everyone wants to claim him, to rewrite his story to satisfy their own particular needs. "

Henry Louis Gates

" Ever since I watched 'Roots,' I've dreamed of tracing my African ancestry and helping other people do the same. "

Henry Louis Gates

" The most ironic outcome of the black Civil Rights movement has been the creation of a new black middle class which is increasingly separate from the black underclass. "

Henry Louis Gates

" You have a diasporic black world, and the only way to put it back together again is symbolic. It's like Humpty Dumpty. Whoever could edit the 'Encyclopedia Africana' would provide symbolic order to the fragments created over the past 500 years. That is a major contribution. "

Henry Louis Gates

" It's very lonely being a prominent black intellectual at an institution where you're the only prominent black intellectual. That was the model that was followed in the late 60s when black studies started. You'd get one here and one there and one here, like Johnny Appleseed. "

Henry Louis Gates

" All of the guests on 'Faces of America' were deeply moved by what we revealed about their ancestry. We were able to trace the ancestry of Native American writer Louise Erdrich back to 438 A.D. We found that Queen Noor is descended from royalty, and that's before she married King Hussein of Jordan. "

Henry Louis Gates

" Fortunately, in President Obama, the child of an African and an American, we finally have a leader who is uniquely positioned to bridge the great reparations divide. "

Henry Louis Gates

" So when you do your family tree and Margaret Cho does hers, and... Wanda Sykes and John Legend... we're adding to the database that scholars can then draw from to generalize about the complexity of the American experience. And that's the contribution that family trees make to broader scholarship. "

Henry Louis Gates

" It's no surprise that White people say things when they are together about Black people. "

Henry Louis Gates

" My father was the funniest man I ever met. He made Redd Foxx look like an undertaker. "

Henry Louis Gates

" The Dominican Republic says 'We're black behind the ears.' And in Mexico, 'there's a black grandma in the closet.' They know, they've just been intermarrying for a long time. But if we did the DNA of everyone in Mexico a whole lot of people would have a whole lot of black in them. "

Henry Louis Gates

" I think that the implication of King's assassination has not been fully appreciated. "

Henry Louis Gates

" First we have to recognize that the cause of poverty is both structural and behavioral. And the first thing about the behavior part is that we need a moral revolution within the African American community. Look - no white racist makes you get pregnant when you are a black teenager. "

Henry Louis Gates

" If Martin Luther King came back, he'd say we need another civil rights movement built on class not race. "

Henry Louis Gates

" Really, the values under which my generation was raised in the '50s were immigrant values even though we weren't immigrants. The greatest thing you could be was a college-educated Negro. "

Henry Louis Gates