Henry Louis Gates Quotes

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

I didn't feel particularly close to my father.

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

We can see that the complexity we witness inside the African-American community today has always been there. Black people were just as noble and just as ignoble as anybody else.

One must learn how to be black in America.

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

It is the black poet who bridges the gap in tradition, who modifies tradition when experience demands it, who translates experience into meaning and meaning into belief.

Insofar as we, critics of the black tradition, master our craft, we serve both to preserve our own traditions and to shape their direction. All great writers demand great critics.

An impressively researched and documented collection of the finest thought produced by writers throughout the African Diaspora. A magnificent achievement.

No white racist makes you get pregnant when you are a black teenager.

Most black leaders, whether left, right or center, from Frederick Douglas and Martin Delaney on in the middle of the 19th century have not even wondered about the merits of the capitalist system.

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

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

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.

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

Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.

For me, a garden is peace of mind. It immediately takes my mind off the thing I'm puzzling about in my work and gives me repose.

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.

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.

Brazil is the second blackest nation in the world.

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

It's fascinating how life works.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.'

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

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.

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.

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.

In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black.

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

I have no plans to slow down.

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

I'm a tech geek. Whenever I read about something new, I think to myself, How can I take this and make it black?

Fortunately, in President Obama, the child of an African and an American, we finally have a leader who is uniquely positioned to bridge the great reparations divide.

no human culture is inaccessible to someone who makes the effort to understand, to learn, to inhabit another world.