Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" It turns out one of my ancestors fought in the Continental Army, so I was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution. "
Henry Louis Gates
American
Army
Revolution
Related Quotes:
" What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories. "
Henry Louis Gates
Way
Me
Kid
" A more humane form of capitalism is about the best I think we can get. Which might sound very reformist or conservative, but that's basically where I am. "
Henry Louis Gates
Sound
Think
I Am
" You can say I had a severe case of 'Roots' envy. I wanted to be like Alex Haley, and I wanted to be able to... do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage, as I like to put it, and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa. "
Henry Louis Gates
Ship
Tree
You
" My brother and I had a really privileged relationship with my parents... They treated us like adults. "
Henry Louis Gates
Relationship
Like
Us
" I give a speech to the black freshmen at Harvard each year, and I say, 'You can like Mozart and ice hockey...' - and then I used to say 'golf,' but Tiger took over golf! - 'and Picasso and still be as black as the ace of spades.' "
Henry Louis Gates
Tiger
You
Speech
" I think that the implication of King's assassination has not been fully appreciated. "
Henry Louis Gates
Been
Appreciated
I Think
" There are just so many stories that are buried on family trees. "
Henry Louis Gates
Family
Trees
Stories
" You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it. "
Henry Louis Gates
Come
Along
You
" I rebel at the notion that I can't be part of other groups, that I can't construct identities through elective affinity, that race must be the most important thing about me. Is that what I want on my gravestone: Here lies an African American? "
Henry Louis Gates
Me
Race
Rebel
" When Europeans came upon real ruined cities they refused to believe that they had been built by Africans. Here the past has been distorted and denied. "
Henry Louis Gates
Ruined
Real
Past
" If you share a common ancestor with somebody, you're related to them. It doesn't mean that you're going to invite them to the family reunion, but it means that you share DNA. "
Henry Louis Gates
Family
DNA
Going
" 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
Children
Truth Is
Truth
" I'm looking forward to the time when we all look like Polynesians. "
Henry Louis Gates
Looking
Looking Forward
Time
" 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
New
Myself
Black
" I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy, and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age, he wanted to be an Episcopal priest, because he so admired his priest, a black man from someplace called Haiti. "
Henry Louis Gates
People
Age
Black
" We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community. "
Henry Louis Gates
Community
City
Attitude
" I didn't feel particularly close to my father. "
Henry Louis Gates
Particularly
Close
Feel
" We can't all work in the inner city. And, I don't even think that it is incumbent upon an African-American intellectual to be concerned in their work with problems of race and class. It's just one of the things, that we here at the DuBois Institute, are concerned about. "
Henry Louis Gates
City
Work
Think
" People are afraid, and when people are afraid, when their pie is shrinking, they look for somebody to hate. They look for somebody to blame. And a real leader speaks to anxiety and to fear and allays those fears, assuages anxiety. "
Henry Louis Gates
Leader
People
Look
" So, Mexico, Brazil, they wanted their national culture to be 'blackish' - really brown, a beautiful brown blend. And finally, I discovered that in each of these societies the people at the bottom are the darkest skinned with the most African features. "
Henry Louis Gates
Culture
Darkest
People
" 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
Bridge
Child
Great
" The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination, by itself, would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor, while expanding opportunities for economic betterment. "
Henry Louis Gates
Opportunities
Ending
Black
" Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but their contributions have been obscured, lost, buried. "
Henry Louis Gates
People
History
Lost
" It's not white versus black any more, it's haves versus have-nots. Unless the black middle-classes unite to promote the interests of the black underclass, tension between them is inevitable. What we, the black middle class have to do, is think of a strategy to avert that. "
Henry Louis Gates
White
Black
Class
" Dr. King's Nobel Prize had a more powerful transforming effect on him than I think he realized at the time. "
Henry Louis Gates
Time
Think
Powerful
" I want to get into the educational DNA of American culture. I want 10 percent of the common culture, more or less, to be black. "
Henry Louis Gates
Culture
Want
Black
" There's a boom in genealogy now. With ancestry.com and other sites digitizing so many of the records, you can now find things in a few minutes that used to take months. "
Henry Louis Gates
You
Used
Take
" In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black. In Brazil, it's almost as if one drop of white ancestry makes you white. "
Henry Louis Gates
Drop
Black
America
" Color categories are on steroids in Latin America. I find that fascinating. It's very difficult for Americans, particularly African-Americans to understand or sympathize with. "
Henry Louis Gates
America
Understand
Very
" 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
Racism
Breathing
Become