Henry Louis Gates Quotes

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

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

My grandfather was coloured, my father was Negro, and I am Black.

I think literacy is everything.

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

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

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

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

Instill respect for teachers.

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

One must learn how to be black in America.

The first slave to read and write was the first to run away.

Kansas City Lightning succeeds as few biographies of jazz musicians have ... This book is a magnificent achievement; I could hardly put it down.

Brazil is the second blackest nation in the world.

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

If America has a civic religion, the First Amendment is its central article of faith.

Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique.

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

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.

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.

Diversity doesn't mean black and white only.

I'm a tech geek.

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

I have no plans to slow down.

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

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

It's fascinating how life works.

I didn't feel particularly close to my father.

That's what I mean by being bilingual: comfortable in your skin, comfortable with all parts of who you are.

Learning to sing one's own songs, to trust the particular cadences of own's voices, is also the goal of any writer.

It turns out one of my ancestors fought in the Continental Army, so I was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution.

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

I don't think the riots derailed the civil rights movement.

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.

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.

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

The genius is making a way out of no way.

Conspiracy theories are an irresistible labor-saving device in the face of complexity.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it.

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

Each individual has a responsibility to get out of bed, learn their ABCs, learn your math tables, not use race and racism as an excuse.

The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African-American we have ever researched.