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 War

More quotes about War

• "He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice."

  Albert Einstein on War

• "One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam."

  Martin Luther King, Jr. on War

• "The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one."

  Albert Einstein on War

• "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

  Dwight D. Eisenhower on War

• "We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills we shall never surrender."

  Winston Churchill on War

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."