Famous Quotes

"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 Little Skip."

Henry Louis Gates on Mom

More quotes about Mom

• "My mother was the most beautiful woman I ever saw. All I am I owe to my mother. I attribute all my success in life to the moral, intellectual and physical education I received from her."

  George Washington on Mom

• "The natural state of motherhood is unselfishness. When you become a mother, you are no longer the center of your own universe. You relinquish that position to your children."

  Jessica Lange on Mom

• "My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it."

  Mark Twain on Mom

• "Men are what their mothers made them."

  Ralph Waldo Emerson on Mom

• "My mother said to me, 'If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.' Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso."

  Pablo Picasso on Mom

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."