Henry Louis Gates Quotes - Page 4

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.

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

The more you learn about yourself and your family tree, your self-esteem goes up. They will learn archival skills, historical analysis and science skills. You learn all this in the most seductive way, and that is through learning about yourself. Who doesn't like talking about themselves? It doesn't seem like science or history, it's just fun.

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

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.

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

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

I believe in the law. I think we have a great system of justice. But I do think that system of justice has been corrupted by racism and classism. I think it's difficult for 'poor people' - poor white people, brown people - to be treated fairly before the law in the same way that upper-class people are.

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

Arnold Rampersad's stunningly revealing biography has, at long last, unveiled-in magisterial prose-the very complex and vulnerable man behind Ralph Ellison's own masks and myths. One of the nation's most brilliant writers emerges as all the more fascinating precisely because he was so very human. Painstakingly researched and compellingly written, Ralph Ellison is a masterwork of the genre of literary biography.

Diversity doesn't mean black and white only.

I have no plans to slow down.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black.

I didn't feel particularly close to my father.

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

Really, the values under which my generation was raised in the '50s were immigrant values even though we weren't immigrants. The greatest thing you could be was a college-educated Negro.

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.

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