Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you. "

Henry Louis Gates

Related Quotes:

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

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

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

Henry Louis Gates

" People don't realize what a brilliant politician Lincoln was. Looking back, we want to ascribe a level of providence to his every decision but he was a cunning and calculating politician; from the cultivation of his image as a hayseed from Illinois, to his ability to keep this country together under dire circumstances. "

Henry Louis Gates

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

Henry Louis Gates

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

Henry Louis Gates

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

Henry Louis Gates

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

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

" 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

" 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

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

Henry Louis Gates

" It's important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilized only when white people arrived. In fact, Africans had been creators of culture for thousands of years before. These were very intelligent, subtle and sophisticated people, with organized societies and great art. "

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

" Everything my mother and father did was designed to put me where I am. "

Henry Louis Gates

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

Henry Louis Gates

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

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 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

" My father, if anything, first and last, was a man of words. He loved stories; he didn't live for stories, exactly, but I think he lived through stories. I think, like many writers, he loved stories about things he had experienced as much as, if not more than, he loved the experiences themselves. "

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

" My family and our neighbors and friends thought of Africa and its Africans as extensions of the stereotyped characters that we saw in movies and on television in films such as 'Tarzan' and in programs such as 'Ramar of the Jungle' and 'Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.' "

Henry Louis Gates