Top 70 Alex Haley Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Either you deal with what is the reality, or you can be sure that the reality is going to deal with you.”

— Alex Haley

2. “Every time an old person dies, it’s like a library burning down.”

— Alex Haley

3. “Anytime you see a turtle up on top of a fence post, you know he had some help.”

— Alex Haley

4. “Nobody can do for little children what grandparents do. Grandparents sort of sprinkle stardust over the lives of little children.”

— Alex Haley

5. “In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage, to know who we are and where we came from.”

— Alex Haley

6. “Unless we learn from history, we are destined to repeat it. This is no longer merely an academic exercise, but may contain our worlds fate and our destiny.”

— Alex Haley

7. “Find the good, and praise it.”

— Alex Haley

8. “In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.”

— Alex Haley

9. “Racism is taught in our society, it is not automatic. It is learned behavior toward persons with dissimilar physical characteristics.”

— Alex Haley

10. “Your attitude is everything. Believe in yourself and trust your material. To be a successful writer, write every single day where you feel like it or not. Never, never give up, and the world will reward you beyond your wildest dreams.”

— Alex Haley

11. “You’re always being judged. No matter what you do, it’s not the right thing. If you didn’t become successful, then you’d be pointed at as one of those creatures down their who didn’t take advantage of this or that, who didn’t climb and rise and so forth.”

— Alex Haley

12. “In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage- to know who we are and where we have come from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.”

— Alex Haley

13. “When you start about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth.”

— Alex Haley

14. “I wasn’t going to be one of those people who died wondering what if? I would keep putting my dreams to the test – even though it meant living with uncertainty and fear of failure. This is the shadowland of hope, and anyone with a dream must learn to live there.”

— Alex Haley

15. “Racism and hatred are synonymous.”

— Alex Haley

16. “Beginning writers must appreciate the prerequisites if they hope to become writers. You pay your dues – which takes years.”

— Alex Haley

17. “The way to succeed is never quit. Thats it. But really be humble about it.”

— Alex Haley

18. “In my writing, as much as I could, I tried to find the good, and praise it.”

— Alex Haley

19. “In the bush, trust no one you don’t know.”

— Alex Haley

20. “We all suffer. If a man’s wise, he learns from it.”

— Alex Haley

21. “I tell younger writers that indeed it is devastating to be rejected. You feel like the bottom dropped out of your world.”

— Alex Haley

22. “Early in the spring of 1750, in the village of Juffure, four days upriver from the coast of The Gambia, West Africa, a manchild was born to Omoro and Binta Kinte.”

— Alex Haley

23. “The main thing you got to remember is that everything in the world is a hustle.”

— Alex Haley

24. “When you clench your fist, no one can put anything in your hand.”

— Alex Haley

25. “My fondest hope is that ‘Roots’ may start black, white, brown, red, yellow people digging back for their own roots. Man, that would make me feel 90 feet tall.”

— Alex Haley

26. “Never completely encircle your enemy. Leave him some escape, for he will fight even more desperately if trapped.”

— Alex Haley

27. “Every death is like the burning of a library.”

— Alex Haley

28. “Most of us prefer to be as quiet as possible about giving, because every time it’s publicized that we do something, if it’s something of the nature of giving, we’ll be doubly besieged, and you really get sick of being always criticized no matter what you do.”

— Alex Haley

29. “I certainly wasn’t seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me, asking questions. One was, “What’s your alma mater?” I told him, “Books.”

— Alex Haley

30. “Roots is not just a saga of my family. It is the symbolic saga of a people.”

— Alex Haley

31. “Raw, naked truth exchanged between the black man and the white man is what a whole lot more of is needed in this country – to clear the air of the racial mirages, cliches, and lies that this country’s very atmosphere has been filled with for four hundred years.”

— Alex Haley

32. “Fend kiling dorong leh warrata ka iteh tee.”

— Alex Haley

33. “You can never enslave somebody who knows who he is.”

— Alex Haley

34. “I think most people when you say slavery tend to see a group of anonymous people pulling cotton sacks in great plantation fields, and that is largely true.”

— Alex Haley

35. “I think one of the most fascinating things you can do after you learn about your own people is to study something about the history and culture of other people.”

— Alex Haley

36. “You don’t spend twenty years of your life in the service and not have a warm, nostalgic feeling left in you. It’s a small service, and there’s a lot of esprit de corps.”

— Alex Haley

37. “I get interviewed a lot, and I found myself listening to what the interviewer is asking me, I’m analyzing what I’m being asked more than my response.”

— Alex Haley

38. “Brown people wouldn’t speak to someone who was black.”

— Alex Haley

39. “I look at my books the way parents look at their children. The fact that one becomes more successful than the others doesn’t make me love the less successful one any less.”

— Alex Haley

40. “I can’t feel Irish to save my soul, but it’s a fact.”

— Alex Haley

41. “My parents were teachers and they went out of their way to see to it that I had books. We grew up in a home that was full of books. And so I learned to read. I loved to read.”

— Alex Haley

42. “I was weeping for all of history’s incredible atrocities against fellowmen, which seems to be mankind’s greatest flaw...”

— Alex Haley

43. “That’s what happens with writing. Ingredients bubble and cook. Material becomes substance.”

— Alex Haley

44. “You have to deal with the fact that your life is your life.”

— Alex Haley

45. “Indeed optimists rather than defeatists have produced the results for which serious genealogical research is best known.”

— Alex Haley

46. “Any person who claims to have deep feeling for other human beings should think a long, long time before he votes to have other men kept behind bars – caged. I am not saying there shouldn’t be prisons, but there shouldn’t be bars. Behind bars, a man never reforms. He will never forget. He will never get completely over the memory of the bars.”

— Alex Haley

47. “Most of the things that are asked of me as a representative black person, would suggest never are we equal Americans.”

— Alex Haley

48. “If you go back to before mankind came out of the cave, there was hatred.”

— Alex Haley

49. “I don’t know anywhere in the world where there is not racism against somebody.”

— Alex Haley

50. “Tying the little folks with the older folks is a great and powerful tool to preserve and to protect the family and the individual.”

— Alex Haley