"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

posted in Fear

Henry Louis Gates quote on Fear: "People are afraid, and when people are afraid, when their pie is shrinking, they look for ..." - Aesthetic Wallpaper & Wisdom

Other Quotes by Henry Louis Gates

Discover more inspiring quotes by Henry Louis Gates

"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

"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

LearningView Quote

"You can say I had a severe case of 'Roots' envy. I wanted to be like Alex Haley, and I wanted to be able to... do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage, as I like to put it, and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa."

-Henry Louis Gates

FamilyView Quote

"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 responsible sexuality, birth within marriage, parents reading to their children and students staying in school and doing homework?"

-Henry Louis Gates

TruthView Quote

"But you see, our society is still trapped in this binary, black/white logic and that has had some very positive implications for our generation. It's had some very negative ones as well and one of the negative ones is that it creates enormous identity problems for people who have one black ancestor and all white ancestors for example."

-Henry Louis Gates

SocietyView Quote

"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

TruthView Quote

Same Category

More quotes in this category

"A line from one of my 1997 columns - 'Do one thing every day that scares you' - is now widely attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, though I have yet to see any evidence that she ever said it and I don't believe she did. She said some things about fear, but not that thing."

-Mary Schmich

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us."

-Marianne Williamson

"In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation."

-Simone de Beauvoir

"Writing is a form of therapy sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation."

-Graham Greene

"It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live."

-Marcus Aurelius

"Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson