Alex Haley Quotes

In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.

Racism is taught in our society, it is not automatic. It is learned behavior toward persons with dissimilar physical characteristics.

Nobody can do for little children what grandparents do. Grandparents sort of sprinkle stardust over the lives of little children.

The way to succeed is never quit. Thats it. But really be humble about it.

Roots is not just a saga of my family. It is the symbolic saga of a people.

Every time an old person dies, it's like a library burning down.

Anytime you see a turtle up on top of a fence post, you know he had some help.

When you start about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth.

When you clench your fist, no one can put anything in your hand.

You have to deal with the fact that your life is your life.

Either you deal with what is the reality, or you can be sure that the reality is going to deal with you.

In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage, to know who we are and where we came from.

You can never enslave somebody who knows who he is.

Never completely encircle your enemy. Leave him some escape, for he will fight even more desperately if trapped.

I can't feel Irish to save my soul, but it's a fact.

Beginning writers must appreciate the prerequisites if they hope to become writers. You pay your dues - which takes years.

Brown people wouldn't speak to someone who was black.

The way to succeed is never quit. That's it. But really be humble about it. ... You start out lowly and humble and you carefully try to learn an accretion of little things that help you get there.

If you go back to before mankind came out of the cave, there was hatred.

In my writing, as much as I could, I tried to find the good, and praise it.

I know that statistically, it has been proven that there is a tremendous amount of black on black crime within the inner cities.

My parents were teachers and they went out of their way to see to it that I had books. We grew up in a home that was full of books. And so I learned to read. I loved to read.

I think most people when you say slavery tend to see a group of anonymous people pulling cotton sacks in great plantation fields, and that is largely true.

I think one of the most fascinating things you can do after you learn about your own people is to study something about the history and culture of other people.

The main thing you got to remember is that everything in the world is a hustle.

My fondest hope is that 'Roots' may start black, white, brown, red, yellow people digging back for their own roots. Man, that would make me feel 90 feet tall.

Tying the little folks with the older folks is a great and powerful tool to preserve and to protect the family and the individual.

I look at my books the way parents look at their children. The fact that one becomes more successful than the others doesn't make me love the less successful one any less.

We all suffer. If a man's wise, he learns from it.

There was a great deal of inbreeding between the Indians and the slaves. Genetically speaking, black people are some part black, some part European.

I tell younger writers that indeed it is devastating to be rejected. You feel like the bottom dropped out of your world.

Every death is like the burning of a library.

Racism and hatred are synonymous.

Unless we learn from history, we are destined to repeat it. This is no longer merely an academic exercise, but may contain our worlds fate and our destiny.

Most of the things that are asked of me as a representative black person, would suggest never are we equal Americans.

But then, as far as I know, as far as I've studied or heard or picked up, it seems that this type of thing is a curse against mankind.

It's an hour during the week where you can just slow down.

I acknowledge immense debt to the griots [tribal poets] of Africa - where today it is rightly said that when a griot dies, it is as if a library has burned to the ground.

You don't spend twenty years of your life in the service and not have a warm, nostalgic feeling left in you. It's a small service, and there's a lot of esprit de corps.

History is written by winners.

I am really quite proud of most of the people I " know who have "made it," who do things to help people.

I get interviewed a lot, and I found myself listening to what the interviewer is asking me, I'm analyzing what I'm being asked more than my response.

Indeed optimists rather than defeatists have produced the results for which serious genealogical research is best known.

The anti-blackness has generated new forms of youth involvement in anti-whiteness, which in some cases is appalling.

In the bush, trust no one you don't know.

That's what happens with writing. Ingredients bubble and cook. Material becomes substance.

Is this how you repay my goodness--with badness?” cried the boy. “Of course,” said the crocodile out of the corner of his mouth. “That is the way of the world.

I don't know anywhere in the world where there is not racism against somebody.

Early in the spring of 1750, in the village of Juffure, four days upriver from the coast of The Gambia, West Africa, a manchild was born to Omoro and Binta Kinte.

All of us - who might have probed space, or cured cancer, or built industries - were, instead, black victims of the white man's American social system.