Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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

Related Quotes:

" 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

" The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred. "

Henry Louis Gates

" There are just so many stories that are buried on family trees. "

Henry Louis Gates

" The Right insists that anyone can escape poverty by working hard but that is simply not the case. "

Henry Louis Gates

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

Henry Louis Gates

" 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

" Lincoln had a tremendous capacity for personal growth - more than any other American President. "

Henry Louis Gates

" All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian's footnotes, the number of examples of specific cases is very, very small. "

Henry Louis Gates

" There are two things that have always haunted me: the brutality of the European traders and the stories I've heard about Africans selling other Africans into slavery. "

Henry Louis Gates

" But you see, our society is still trapped in this binary, black/white logic and that has had some very positive implications for our generation. It's had some very negative ones as well and one of the negative ones is that it creates enormous identity problems for people who have one black ancestor and all white ancestors for example. "

Henry Louis Gates

" My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree. "

Henry Louis Gates

" I'm looking forward to the time when we all look like Polynesians. "

Henry Louis Gates

Looking Forward

" 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

" Very few, if any, first-generation black or white or Asian kids will pursue a Ph.D. They'll pursue the professions for economic security. Many will go to law school and/or business school. "

Henry Louis Gates

" Diversity doesn't mean black and white only. "

Henry Louis Gates

" People who own property feel a sense of ownership in their future and their society. They study, save, work, strive and vote. And people trapped in a culture of tenancy do not. "

Henry Louis Gates

" 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

" 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

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

Henry Louis Gates

" Since the day Martin Luther King was killed, the black middle classes have almost quadrupled, but the percentage of black children living on or below the poverty line is almost the same. "

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

" I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten. "

Henry Louis Gates

" Dr. King's Nobel Prize had a more powerful transforming effect on him than I think he realized at the time. "

Henry Louis Gates

" Keeping the Union together, freeing slaves and being assassinated all added up to creating 'Lincoln the myth.' He overcame a lot of his own prejudices and became what many would consider the first black man's president. "

Henry Louis Gates

" Lincoln would love the fact that Obama is such a great conciliator, trying to transcend ideology. "

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 can find virtually everybody black back as far as the 1870 census. Why 1870? That's when the ex-slaves first have surnames. But if you find your great-great-grandfather in 1870 and it says he's 50, that means he was born in 1820 and you're back to 1820 already. For an American that's pretty damned good, you know? "

Henry Louis Gates

" America is the greatest nation ever founded. The ideals are the greatest ever espoused in human history, and we just need the country to live up to them. But what I worry about are the 1 million black men in the prison system. "

Henry Louis Gates