Henry Louis Gates

“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...”

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

“I'm a tech geek.”

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

“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.”

“The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of black suffering, some of them self-inflicted. Why can't black leaders organize rallies around...”

“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 mil...”

“A more humane form of capitalism is about the best I think we can get. Which might sound very reformist or conservative, but that's basically where I am.”

“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 ju...”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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...”

“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. For my own people, it was im...”

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

“My mom, God rest her soul - she liked nicknames. In the womb she named me Skip. There was another black guy in Piedmont, W.Va., and his name was Skip. They called him Big Skip, and I was Lit...”

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

“Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but their contributions have been obscured, lost, buried.”

“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.”