Quote

I have no plans to slow down.

Henry Louis Gates

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Henry Louis Gates
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: September 16
Critic
Essayist
Genealogist
Historian
Journalist
Literary Critic
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Keyser
West Virginia
Henry Louis Gates
Plans
Slow

More quotes by Henry Louis Gates

Image
I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy, and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age, he wanted to be an Episcopal priest, because he so admired his priest, a black man from someplace called Haiti.
Henry Louis Gates
Image
Ending the slave trade was contrary to British economic interests. For all its limitations and hypocrisies - British slavery itself, of course, still continued to exist - I still think it was a great moment in human history.
Henry Louis Gates
Image
It's no surprise that White people say things when they are together about Black people.
Henry Louis Gates
Image
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.
Henry Louis Gates
Image
I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.
Henry Louis Gates
Image
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.
Henry Louis Gates
Image
I think that the roots of racism have always been economic, and I think people are desperate and scared. And when you're desperate and scared you scapegoat people. It exacerbates latent tendencies toward - well, toward racism or homophobia or anti-Semitism.
Henry Louis Gates
Image
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
Image
I knew that there were black people in Africa, of course, unfortunately because of movies such as 'Tarzan.'
Henry Louis Gates
Image
The most ironic outcome of the black Civil Rights movement has been the creation of a new black middle class which is increasingly separate from the black underclass.
Henry Louis Gates
Image
In 1957, when I was in second grade, black children integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. We watched it on TV. All of us watched it. I don't mean Mama and Daddy and Rocky. I mean all the colored people in America watched it, together, with one set of eyes.
Henry Louis Gates
Image
I rebel at the notion that I can't be part of other groups, that I can't construct identities through elective affinity, that race must be the most important thing about me. Is that what I want on my gravestone: Here lies an African American?
Henry Louis Gates
Image
There haven't been fundamental structural changes in America. There's been a very important symbolic change and that is the election of Barack Obama. But the only black people who truly live in a post-racial world in America all live in a very nice house on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Henry Louis Gates
Image
The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination, by itself, would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor, while expanding opportunities for economic betterment.
Henry Louis Gates
Image
Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.
Henry Louis Gates
Image
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.
Henry Louis Gates
Image
The first step toward tolerance is respect and the first step toward respect is knowledge.
Henry Louis Gates
Image
We can't all work in the inner city. And, I don't even think that it is incumbent upon an African-American intellectual to be concerned in their work with problems of race and class. It's just one of the things, that we here at the DuBois Institute, are concerned about.
Henry Louis Gates
Image
What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories.
Henry Louis Gates
Image
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.
Henry Louis Gates