Henry Louis Gates Quotes

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Henry Louis Gates

Profession : Critic

Birth : September 16, 1950

The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.

Henry Louis Gates

The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of black suffering, some of them self-inflicted. Why can't black leaders organize rallies around responsible sexuality, birth within marriage, parents reading to their children and students staying in school and doing homework?

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

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

Henry Louis Gates

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

Henry Louis Gates

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.

Henry Louis Gates

Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.

Henry Louis Gates

It's fascinating how life works.

Henry Louis Gates

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

Henry Louis Gates

In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black.

Henry Louis Gates

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

Henry Louis Gates

Diversity doesn't mean black and white only.

Henry Louis Gates

People are afraid, and when people are afraid, when their pie is shrinking, they look for somebody to hate. They look for somebody to blame. And a real leader speaks to anxiety and to fear and allays those fears, assuages anxiety.

Henry Louis Gates

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

Henry Louis Gates

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

Henry Louis Gates

I'm a tech geek.

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

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

Henry Louis Gates

But you see, our society is still trapped in this binary, black/white logic and that has had some very positive implications for our generation. It's had some very negative ones as well and one of the negative ones is that it creates enormous identity problems for people who have one black ancestor and all white ancestors for example.

Henry Louis Gates

We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community.

Henry Louis Gates