Bob Edwards Quotes

If I can go three grandmothers back and find a slave, that means someone else can go three grandmothers back and find a slave owner. When you interrogate your histories, it forces you to rethink who you are and where you are.

I come from a family of servants. My father's father was a servant, and my father's father's father was a slave.

It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations.

Roots is not just a saga of my family. It is the symbolic saga of a people.

The Carter family history means a lot to me.

From the moment we were first dumped in Jamestown and had our teeth checked before getting sold off and later considered three-fifths of a human being, an abundance of 'likability' hasn't been something blacks have had to stockpile. Instead, it's been a centuries-long battle for respectability.

If the picture speaks to me, if it tells me something about myself, then I want it. Then I have to have it.

I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.

My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree.

Genealogy, n. An account of one's descent from a man who did not particularly care to trace his own.

I'm less interested in slasher, and go more for roles that can affect you on a personal level. I'm interested in human empathy in the movies I see, and in the ones I am a part of.

I'm always looking for that movie that feels like it's hitting me where I need it.

Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.

I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.

The truth is very few of us are related to Napoleon or Cleopatra. Although, those are bad examples as I am actually descended from both of them.

I don't have to look up my family tree, because I know that I'm the sap.

So the Negro race has continued, and today is the day of the Negro as far as the world is concerned. They have influenced the generations of time; they have mixed their blood with many peoples, until there are many peoples not able to hold the priesthood.

I took the role because it's rare to read a script that makes me laugh and cry, and it spoke to my own religious feelings, as well as giving me a chance to draw on my experience as a parent. Accepting it was a no-brainer.

I wish I could have 25,000 years of my personal family history documented in a very powerful computer or a CD-ROM that I could just pop in and my computer would never crash.

My dad has done a bit of research on our family tree, and we can trace it quite far back. My dad believes he has traced us back to being a great-great-great-great-great-great cousin of Wellington.

I was thinking of my father's family. I can find their graves, but not that much about them. They didn't do anything notable enough to be in the records of newspapers.

We live in a society that celebrates familial connection above any other kind of relationship. We are shown photos of our great-grandparents and encouraged to marvel over facial similarities. We are told to take pride in our bloodlines, celebrate our ancestry.

… people never become a mass, they remain entities, and so you are able to feel human suffering and make others feel it because it is represented to you by individuals

As you get older, you get more... genealogical.

People don't know that the very reason the police were made was to oversee slaves; they would be called overseers, and if a slave got out of line or tried to break away and escape, these were the people to hold them in and bring them back.