"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

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"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

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"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

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"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

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"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

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"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

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"Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. And today? Today is a gift. That's why we call it the present."

-Babatunde Olatunji

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"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."

-Winston Churchill

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"Man's naked form belongs to no particular moment in history it is eternal, and can be looked upon with joy by the people of all ages."

-Auguste Rodin

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"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality."

-Desmond Tutu

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"History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are."

-David McCullough

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"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."

-H. G. Wells

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