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

Henry Louis Gates

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" My father lived to be 97 and played bridge every day up to the end, so I've got a 50 percent chance of living a long life like him. "

Henry Louis Gates

" Cuba is like going to a whole other planet. It's so different but it's so similar to the United States, to Miami. It's like a doppelgaenger. It's the mirror image. And I have no doubt, that once Cuba becomes democratic, that it will be the favorite tourist destination for Americans. "

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

" 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

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

Henry Louis Gates

" 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

" 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

" Politicians will not put forth programs aimed at the problems of poor blacks while their turnout remains so low. "

Henry Louis Gates

" My brother and I had a really privileged relationship with my parents... They treated us like adults. "

Henry Louis Gates

" Remember, I have a Ph.D. in English literature. "

Henry Louis Gates

" It's fascinating how life works. "

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

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

Henry Louis Gates

" In Ethiopia, the black people became Christians 1700 years ago, hundreds of years before Northern Europe turned to Christianity... And here, most of the saints are black. "

Henry Louis Gates

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

Henry Louis Gates

" The only people who live in a post-black world are four people who live in a little white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. The idea that America is post-racial or post-black because a man I admire, Barack Obama, is president of the United States, is a joke. And I hope no one will even wonder about this crazy fiction again. "

Henry Louis Gates

" My mom, God rest her soul - she liked nicknames. In the womb she named me Skip. There was another black guy in Piedmont, W.Va., and his name was Skip. They called him Big Skip, and I was Little Skip. "

Henry Louis Gates

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" I would like to do a series about sequencing the human genome, and also analyze more human diversity among other ethnic groups - a 'Faces of America 2.' "

Henry Louis Gates

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

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