Top 100 Henry Louis Gates Jr. Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The first step toward tolerance is respect and the first step toward respect is knowledge.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

2. “The genius is making a way out of no way.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

3. “Diversity doesn’t mean black and white only.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

4. “I think literacy is everything.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

5. “Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

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.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

7. “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 Jr.

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

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

9. “You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

10. “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.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

11. “My family and our neighbors and friends thought of Africa and its Africans as extensions of the stereotyped characters that we saw in movies and on television in films such as ‘Tarzan’ and in programs such as ‘Ramar of the Jungle’ and ‘Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.’”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

12. “If you share a common ancestor with somebody, you’re related to them. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to invite them to the family reunion, but it means that you share DNA. I think it’s fascinating.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

13. “My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

14. “It’s fascinating how life works.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

15. “It’s not white versus black any more, it’s haves versus have-nots. Unless the black middle-classes unite to promote the interests of the black underclass, tension between them is inevitable. What we, the black middle class have to do, is think of a strategy to avert that.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

16. “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 Jr.

17. “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 Jr.

18. “It’s important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilized only when white people arrived. In fact, Africans had been creators of culture for thousands of years before. These were very intelligent, subtle and sophisticated people, with organized societies and great art.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

19. “The Dominican Republic says ‘We’re black behind the ears.’ And in Mexico, ‘there’s a black grandma in the closet.’ They know, they’ve just been intermarrying for a long time. But if we did the DNA of everyone in Mexico a whole lot of people would have a whole lot of black in them.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

20. “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 Jr.

21. “In America there is institutional racism that we all inherit and participate in, like breathing the air in this room – and we have to become sensitive to it.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

22. “The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

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

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

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

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

25. “No one thinks of Mexico and Peru as black. But Mexico and Peru together got 700,000 Africans in the slave trade. The coast of Acapulco was a black city in the 1870s. And the Veracruz Coast on the gulf of Mexico and the Costa Chica, south of Acapulco are traditional black lands.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

26. “That’s what I mean by being bilingual: comfortable in your skin, comfortable with all parts of who you are.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

27. “Conspiracy theories are an irresistible labor-saving device in the face of complexity.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

28. “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 Jr.

29. “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 Jr.

30. “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 Jr.

31. “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 Jr.

32. “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 Jr.

33. “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 Jr.

34. “The first slave to read and write was the first to run away.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

35. “It’s very lonely being a prominent black intellectual at an institution where you’re the only prominent black intellectual. That was the model that was followed in the late 60s when black studies started. You’d get one here and one there and one here, like Johnny Appleseed.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

36. “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 Jr.

37. “I have no plans to slow down.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

38. “Fortunately, in President Obama, the child of an African and an American, we finally have a leader who is uniquely positioned to bridge the great reparations divide.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

39. “There are just so many stories that are buried on family trees.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

40. “Keeping the Union together, freeing slaves and being assassinated all added up to creating ‘Lincoln the myth.’ He overcame a lot of his own prejudices and became what many would consider the first black man’s president.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

41. “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 Jr.

42. “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 Jr.

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

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

44. “Brazil is the second blackest nation in the world.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

45. “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 Jr.

46. “The Right insists that anyone can escape poverty by working hard but that is simply not the case.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

47. “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.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

48. “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 Jr.

49. “Because Lincoln is so closely identified with what it is to be American, everyone wants to claim him, to rewrite his story to satisfy their own particular needs.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

50. “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 Jr.