Top 100 Henry Louis Gates Jr. Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 3

51. “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 Jr.

52. “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 Jr.

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

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

54. “Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

55. “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 Jr.

56. “For as long as I can remember, I have been passionately intrigued by ‘Africa,’ by the word itself, by its flora and fauna, its topographical diversity and grandeur; but above all else, by the sheer variety of the colors of its people, from tan and sepia to jet and ebony.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

57. “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.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

58. “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 Jr.

59. “So, Mexico, Brazil, they wanted their national culture to be ‘blackish’ – really brown, a beautiful brown blend. And finally, I discovered that in each of these societies the people at the bottom are the darkest skinned with the most African features.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

60. “I’m looking forward to the time when we all look like Polynesians.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

61. “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 Jr.

62. “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 Jr.

63. “You notice patterns. White guests often are mortified – that word again – when they learn their ancestors owned slaves. But I’ve never had a black guest who was upset to learn about white ancestry that probably involved forced sexual relations.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

64. “We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

65. “Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

66. “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.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

67. “Color categories are on steroids in Latin America. I find that fascinating. It’s very difficult for Americans, particularly African-Americans to understand or sympathize with.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

68. “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 Jr.

69. “No white racist makes you get pregnant when you are a black teenager.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

70. “Lincoln had a tremendous capacity for personal growth – more than any other American President.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

71. “If America has a civic religion, the First Amendment is its central article of faith.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

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

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

73. “In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

74. “Instill respect for teachers.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

75. “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 Jr.

76. “All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian’s footnotes, the number of examples of specific cases is very, very small.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

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

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

78. “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.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

79. “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 Jr.

80. “My father was the funniest man I ever met. He made Redd Foxx look like an undertaker.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

81. “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.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

82. “I don’t think the riots derailed the civil rights movement.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

83. “You have a diasporic black world, and the only way to put it back together again is symbolic. It’s like Humpty Dumpty. Whoever could edit the ‘Encyclopedia Africana’ would provide symbolic order to the fragments created over the past 500 years. That is a major contribution.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

84. “We can’t all work in the inner city. And, I don’t even think that it is incumbent upon an African-American intellectual to be concerned in their work with problems of race and class. It’s just one of the things, that we here at the DuBois Institute, are concerned about.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

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

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

86. “It’s no surprise that White people say things when they are together about Black people.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

87. “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 Jr.

88. “Most black leaders, whether left, right or center, from Frederick Douglas and Martin Delaney on in the middle of the 19th century have not even wondered about the merits of the capitalist system.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

89. “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.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

90. “There are two things that have always haunted me: the brutality of the European traders and the stories I’ve heard about Africans selling other Africans into slavery.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

91. “If Martin Luther King came back, he’d say we need another civil rights movement built on class not race.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

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

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

93. “Ever since I watched ‘Roots,’ I’ve dreamed of tracing my African ancestry and helping other people do the same.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

94. “One must learn how to be black in America.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

95. “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 Jr.

96. “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.”

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.

97. “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 Jr.

98. “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 Jr.

99. “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 Jr.

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

— Henry Louis Gates Jr.