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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

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Henry Louis Gates
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: September 16
Critic
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West Virginia
Henry Louis Gates
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More quotes by Henry Louis Gates

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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.'
Henry Louis Gates
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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.
Henry Louis Gates
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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.
Henry Louis Gates
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If you don't tell your stories, other people will tell their story about you. It's important that we nurture and protect these memories. Things change. Existence means change.
Henry Louis Gates
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My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree.
Henry Louis Gates
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You should not pick an occupation because your think your parents want you to do it, or because you think it's the noble thing to do. You should only pick a job because it turns you on.
Henry Louis Gates
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So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history.
Henry Louis Gates
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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.
Henry Louis Gates
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My grandfather was coloured, my father was Negro, and I am Black.
Henry Louis Gates
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Brazil is the second blackest nation in the world.
Henry Louis Gates
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Learning to sing one's own songs, to trust the particular cadences of own's voices, is also the goal of any writer.
Henry Louis Gates
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Conspiracy theories are an irresistible labor-saving device in the face of complexity.
Henry Louis Gates
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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?
Henry Louis Gates
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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
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It's no surprise that White people say things when they are together about Black people.
Henry Louis Gates
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I use African-American, because I teach African Studies as well as African-American Studies, so it's easy, neat and convenient. But sometimes, when you're in a barber shop, somebody'll say, Did you see what that Negro did? A lot of people slip in and out of different terms effortlessly, and I don't think the thought police should be on patrol.
Henry Louis Gates
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I don't think the riots derailed the civil rights movement.
Henry Louis Gates
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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
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We really invented the genre of tracing family trees and going back as far as we could on the paper trail. When the paper trail disappeared, we used DNA analysis. The technology was just being invented that allowed you to trace ancestry through DNA.
Henry Louis Gates
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So, the kind of precious memories about being black for my generation won't exist for my kids' and grandkids' generations unless we preserve them through fiction, through film, through comic books, and every other form of media we can possibly utilize to perpetuate the story of the great African-American people.
Henry Louis Gates