79+ Henry Louis Gates Quotes On Slavery, Education And Pbs

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an American literary critic, educator, historian, filmmaker, and public intellectual. He is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Gates is best known for his work in African American literature, African American history, and the history of the African diaspora. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Henry Louis Gates on slavery, leadership, education.

Top 10 Henry Louis Gates Quotes

1. The story of the African-American people is the story of the settlement and growth of America itself, a universal tale that all people should experience.
2. The first step toward tolerance is respect and the first step toward respect is knowledge.
3. Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.
4. Well, certainly one of the ironies of the success of affirmative action is that the middle class within the black community no longer lives within 'black community' by and large.
5. You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it.
6. 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.
7. The precise form of an individual's activity is determined, of course, by the equipment with which he came into the world. In other words, it is determined by his heredity.
8. Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique.
9. Instill respect for teachers.
10. Conspiracy theories are an irresistible labor-saving device in the face of complexity.

Henry Louis Gates Short Quotes

• Without doubt, President [Barack] Obama is a great historical figure.
• No white racist makes you get pregnant when you are a black teenager.
• In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black.
• I didn't feel particularly close to my father.
• It's no surprise that White people say things when they are together about Black people.
• One must learn how to be black in America.
• My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree.
• Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.
• Remember, I have a Ph.D. in English literature.
• The first slave to read and write was the first to run away.

Henry Louis Gates Quotes About Love

I want to be remembered as someone who tried to bring the story of our ancestors to the broadest possible audience. I want to be remembered as a man who loved his race. — Henry Louis Gates

The truth is I would do my job for free! I love it every day. If you can possibly choose a vocation that's an avocation, a job that's really a hobby, then you'll be way ahead of the game. — Henry Louis Gates

My father, if anything, first and last, was a man of words. He loved stories; he didn't live for stories, exactly, but I think he lived through stories. I think, like many writers, he loved stories about things he had experienced as much as, if not more than, he loved the experiences themselves. — Henry Louis Gates

Henry Louis Gates Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

We have to stop making excuses. One of the things that I'm careful to show is the horrendous effects of institutional and structural racism, but in the end, you can't wait for white man or a Black man to come riding in on a white horse to save you. We have to save ourselves, and that's the lesson of "The African Americans." — Henry Louis Gates

I thought, "why don't we be innovative and create something nobody had ever done before?" It was a huge hit and we immediately did a sequel with Chris Rock, Morgan Freeman, Tina Turner and Maya Angelou. — Henry Louis Gates

The biggest surprise for me, without a doubt, was that the first black people who came to the United States weren't the 20 who arrived in Jamestown in 1619. All of us had been taught that. The first African came to Florida in 1513. And the huge shock is we know his name, Juan Garrido, and that he wasn't a slave. He was free! — Henry Louis Gates

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

The more you learn about yourself and your family tree, your self-esteem goes up. They will learn archival skills, historical analysis and science skills. You learn all this in the most seductive way, and that is through learning about yourself. Who doesn't like talking about themselves? It doesn't seem like science or history, it's just fun. — Henry Louis Gates

Where do real conversations about citizenship occur? In our schools. Think about the things you learned in first grade. "My Country 'Tis of Thee," "I pledge allegiance to the flag," "America the Beautiful." — Henry Louis Gates

That's what I mean by being bilingual: comfortable in your skin, comfortable with all parts of who you are. — Henry Louis Gates

Kansas City Lightning succeeds as few biographies of jazz musicians have. . . This book is a magnificent achievement; I could hardly put it down. — Henry Louis Gates

We must begin to understand the nature of intertextuality . . . the manner by which texts poems and novels respond to other texts. After all, all cats may be black at night, but not to other cats. — Henry Louis Gates

Everybody wants to have sex - you don't have to have a baby when you're 16. You don't have to do drugs. I think our Sunday schools should be turned into Black history schools and computer schools on the weekend, just like Hebrew schools for Jewish people, or my Asian friends who send their kids to schools on the weekend to learn Chinese or Korean. — Henry Louis Gates

For me, a garden is peace of mind. It immediately takes my mind off the thing I'm puzzling about in my work and gives me repose. — Henry Louis Gates

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. — Henry Louis Gates

If America has a civic religion, the First Amendment is its central article of faith. — Henry Louis Gates

What people forget is that the most radical thing about Obama is that he was the first black man in history to imagine that he could become president, who was able to make other Americans believe it as well. Other than that, he is a centrist, just like I try to be. He's been bridging divisions his whole life. — Henry Louis Gates

The thing about living in a village at the foot of a mountain is that the world for you becomes, without thinking about it, self-contained. People are of two kinds, really: from the Valley, and from Elsewhere. — Henry Louis Gates

We have chaos reigning in the Middle East. There is a great deal of instability. In the past, people would have turned to their church, and some still do. Counterintuitively, people are now turning into themselves to find their roots. The way you do that is through your family tree. "Where did I come from?" There is an urge to preserve the names of the people who produced you. — Henry Louis Gates

I'd say imagine that you wake up one morning when you're going through a midlife crisis. You're getting divorced. Your kids won't speak to you. Their faces are covered with acne, and you have to decide why you should get out of bed. That's the career you should pick. The one that keeps you going no matter what, even if your life is falling apart. That's how I feel about my career. — Henry Louis Gates

In the old days, you lived in one neighborhood, you knew all your neighbors and your daughter married the guy next door. That was social and economic progress. That model is gone now. We also had a world order that was fraught but fairly stable. — Henry Louis Gates

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

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

It's fascinating how life works. — Henry Louis Gates

I knew that there were black people in Africa, of course, unfortunately because of movies such as 'Tarzan.' — Henry Louis Gates

You had one guy who was a slave, and another who wasn't. And I actually know what happened to them. [Juan ] Garrido ended up getting good jobs and a pension in Mexico which was the center of New Spain, as it was called. Esteban ended up being killed by the Zuni Indians. — Henry Louis Gates

My producers and I worked with these consultants and came up with seventy [stories] which we think are exemplary of the larger arc of African-American history between 1513 and 2013. We covered half a millennium, and it's amazing. — Henry Louis Gates

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. — Henry Louis Gates

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

Thousand years ago, we all descended from Africans who left the continent. Those ancestors, we will never know their name. We can go back 200 or 300 years and actually populate your family tree with real people who had names and documents. They had customs, characteristics that, unbeknownst to you, you have inherited. Almost through osmosis it has been passed down to you. — Henry Louis Gates

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. — Henry Louis Gates

I think literacy is everything. — Henry Louis Gates

Arnold Rampersad's stunningly revealing biography has, at long last, unveiled-in magisterial prose-the very complex and vulnerable man behind Ralph Ellison's own masks and myths. One of the nation's most brilliant writers emerges as all the more fascinating precisely because he was so very human. Painstakingly researched and compellingly written, Ralph Ellison is a masterwork of the genre of literary biography. — Henry Louis Gates

An impressively researched and documented collection of the finest thought produced by writers throughout the African Diaspora. A magnificent achievement. — Henry Louis Gates

The second thing that happened is, DNA analysis is much more sophisticated. All you have to do now is spit in a test tube and you find out all kind of things in six weeks - where they are from in Africa or Europe. You can prove or disprove the fundamental African-American myth that you descended from a Cherokee great, great grandmother. — Henry Louis Gates

The first slave came to Florida in 1526. The first one we know by name, Esteban, which means Stephen, came a couple of years later. So, we start with the stories of Juan Garrido and Esteban to show that African-American people have been here a century longer than anyone thought, and that the diversity we see in the African-American community today has existed since the beginning. — Henry Louis Gates

It is the black poet who bridges the gap in tradition, who modifies tradition when experience demands it, who translates experience into meaning and meaning into belief. — Henry Louis Gates

Insofar as we, critics of the black tradition, master our craft, we serve both to preserve our own traditions and to shape their direction. All great writers demand great critics. — Henry Louis Gates

I try to be sensitive, but the atmosphere I create is very supportive. One overriding premise of the series is that guilt is not heritable. It's good to know about them, but you are not responsible for them. You don't have to apologize for them. It's a process of knowing, and the more you know, the richer the sense of yourself. The firmer your foundation as a human being is — Henry Louis Gates

What happened in the interim is, billions of records have been digitized. Historians and scholars have always used genealogical records to tell the story of American history. It takes months and years of research. I can't even tell you how laborious that is. You have to be somebody who has a lot of free time, like a professor who can take tenure or someone with a great deal of leisure. — Henry Louis Gates

Mama and I would go to a funeral and she'd stand up to read the dead person's eulogy. She made the ignorant and ugly sound like scholars and movie stars, turned the mean and evil into saints and angels. She knew what people had meant to be in their hearts, not what the world had forced them to become. She knew the ways in which working too hard for paltry wages could turn you mean and cold, could kill the thing that made you laugh. — Henry Louis Gates

Like the amazing story of Anthony Johnson. This man was a slave, then became free, accumulated 250 acres, and even had his own slave, a black man who took him to court in Virginia in 1654.That man argued that he should be freed like an indentured servant. But Johnson, who we believe was a pure African from Angola, said, "No way, you're my slave." And the court agreed. — Henry Louis Gates

In a one-hour documentary, you can tell maybe ten stories. That's how the documentary is structured. I wrote to forty of the greatest historians of both African and African-American history, and hired them as consultants. I had them submit what they thought were the indispensable stories, the ones they felt this series absolutely had to include. — Henry Louis Gates

Our society is driven today by so much ethnic discord. We have Black Lives Matter, which I praise and celebrate. We have the demagogues stereotyping Muslims and resurrecting racist stereotypes they used to visit on us. The larger goal is to show that we are all the same, we all come from Africa, and we all have the same larger family tree. It's about the fundamental unity of the human community. — Henry Louis Gates

Precisely that, covering 500 years of African-American history in six hours. I've been working on this for seven years. The biggest challenge was deciding which stories to tell. — Henry Louis Gates

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

Each individual has a responsibility to get out of bed, learn their ABCs, learn your math tables, not use race and racism as an excuse. — Henry Louis Gates

We can see that the complexity we witness inside the African-American community today has always been there. Black people were just as noble and just as ignoble as anybody else. — Henry Louis Gates

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

The genius is making a way out of no way. — Henry Louis Gates

My earliest childhood memory is of my father going crazy when the Giants won the World Series in 1954. He started whoopin' and hollerin' and jumpin' up and down all around the living room. I started crying because he scared me to death. — Henry Louis Gates

I find that people today tend to use them interchangeably. 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

The act of writing for the slave constituted the act of creating a public, historical self, not only the self of the individual author but also the self, as it were, of the race. — Henry Louis Gates

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

I want to be black, to know black, to luxuriate in whatever I might be calling blackness at any particular time, but to do so in order to come out on the other side, to experience a humanity that is neither colorless nor reducible to color. — Henry Louis Gates

I got a letter from this lady of Russian and Jewish descent. She asked me if I was a racist because I didn't do any White people. I was shocked, because my mandate is to do Black studies. It would have never occurred to me if this lady hadn't written this letter. We decided we were going expand the brand and do everybody. — Henry Louis Gates

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

The truth is I would do my job for free! I love it every day. If you can possibly choose a vocation that's an avocation, a job that's really a hobby, then you'll be way ahead of the game. 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

Life Lessons by Henry Louis Gates

1. Henry Louis Gates has taught us to think critically about the way race and identity are represented in literature and culture.
2. He has also highlighted the importance of understanding the history of African American literature and culture in order to better appreciate its significance in today's society.
3. Through his work, Gates has shown us that it is essential to look beyond what is on the surface and to consider the deeper implications of the stories we tell.