Famous Quotes

"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 on Great

More quotes about Great

• "Great minds discuss ideas average minds discuss events small minds discuss people."

  Eleanor Roosevelt on Great

• "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."

  Albert Einstein on Great

• "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them."

  William Shakespeare on Great

• "One sees great things from the valley only small things from the peak."

  Gilbert K. Chesterton on Great

• "All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope."

  Winston Churchill on Great

More quotes by Henry Louis Gates

• "I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy, and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age, he wanted to be an Episcopal priest, because he so admired his priest, a black man from someplace called Haiti."

• "Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice."

• "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."

• "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."

• "Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique. When you're willing to stand up within the group and say, 'It is wrong for Black people to be anti-Semitic,' or 'It is wrong for America to discriminate against persons of African descent and made them slaves and based its wealth upon free labor,' it's crucial to say that."