Quotes By Henry Louis Gates

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.

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.

America is the greatest nation ever founded. The ideals are the greatest ever espoused in human history, and we just need the country to live up to them. But what I worry about are the 1 million black men in the prison system.

In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black.

One principle I've been fighting for that doesn't endear me to a lot of people is that black people can be just as complicated and screwed up as white people. Our motives can be just as base and violent. Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.

If you share a common ancestor with somebody, you're related to them. It doesn't mean that you're going to invite them to the family reunion, but it means that you share DNA.

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

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

It's important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilized only when white people arrived. In fact, Africans had been creators of culture for thousands of years before. These were very intelligent, subtle and sophisticated people, with organized societies and great art.

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

Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique.

I have no plans to slow down.

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.

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

People don't realize what a brilliant politician Lincoln was. Looking back, we want to ascribe a level of providence to his every decision but he was a cunning and calculating politician; from the cultivation of his image as a hayseed from Illinois, to his ability to keep this country together under dire circumstances.

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

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

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

First we have to recognize that the cause of poverty is both structural and behavioral. And the first thing about the behavior part is that we need a moral revolution within the African American community. Look - no white racist makes you get pregnant when you are a black teenager.

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

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.

If you share a common ancestor with somebody, you're related to them. It doesn't mean that you're going to invite them to the family reunion, but it means that you share DNA. I think it's fascinating.

You have a diasporic black world, and the only way to put it back together again is symbolic. It's like Humpty Dumpty. Whoever could edit the 'Encyclopedia Africana' would provide symbolic order to the fragments created over the past 500 years. That is a major contribution.

Let's face it - think of Africa, and the first images that come to mind are of war, poverty, famine and flies. How many of us really know anything at all about the truly great ancient African civilizations, which in their day, were just as splendid and glorious as any on the face of the earth?

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.

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

My family and our neighbors and friends thought of Africa and its Africans as extensions of the stereotyped characters that we saw in movies and on television in films such as 'Tarzan' and in programs such as 'Ramar of the Jungle' and 'Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.'

In America there is institutional racism that we all inherit and participate in, like breathing the air in this room - and we have to become sensitive to it.

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

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.'