Explore Quotes by Henry Louis Gates

Cuba is like going to a whole other planet. It's so different but it's so similar to the United States, to Miami. It's like a doppelgaenger. It's the mirror image. And I have no doubt, that once Cuba becomes democratic, that it will be the favorite tourist destination for Americans.

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

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

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

In fact, the class divide in the black community is now seen by some as a permanent aspect of our existence.

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.

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

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

I'm looking forward to the time when we all look like Polynesians.

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

Dr. King's Nobel Prize had a more powerful transforming effect on him than I think he realized at the time.

I want to get into the educational DNA of American culture. I want 10 percent of the common culture, more or less, to be black.

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.

The African American's relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent, at least since the early nineteenth century, when 3,000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa.

Brazil is the second blackest nation in the world.

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.

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

Politicians will not put forth programs aimed at the problems of poor blacks while their turnout remains so low.

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

I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.

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