Henry Louis Gates Jr. Quotes

If you don't tell your stories, other people will tell their story about you. It's important that we nurture and protect these memories. Things change. Existence means change.

Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I'm using my own memory, and I'm using my collective memory.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: 'I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.'

I want to be remembered as someone who tried to bring the story of our ancestors to the broadest possible audience. I want to be remembered as a man who loved his race.

So, the kind of precious memories about being black for my generation won't exist for my kids' and grandkids' generations unless we preserve them through fiction, through film, through comic books, and every other form of media we can possibly utilize to perpetuate the story of the great African-American people.

I have a real interest in working with younger Native artists. I think it's a very important way for Native people to communicate the realities of our culture and remember our ancestors.

I want to make it clear that the black race did not come to the United States culturally empty-handed. The role and importance of ethnic history is in how well it teaches a people to use their own talents, take pride in their own history and love their own memories.

My work is as an ethnographic rescuer: a conduit between past and future generations. The urgency of this effort cannot be overstated.

Whole generations have forgotten history.

Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.

When I was in South Africa, I went for dinner with some friends, and I knew more about their history than they did - it just hasn't been told.

Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

I started doing some interviews with elderly people in the family because I knew they would pass away and we would lose the power of their story.

A concerted effort to preserve our heritage is a vital link to our cultural, educational, aesthetic, inspirational, and economic legacies - all of the things that quite literally make us who we are.

A people without a history is like the wind over buffalo grass.

Dick Gregory and Richard Pryor laid the groundwork for us as Indian-Americans. How can we add our story to their groundwork is the question.

A people without a positive history is like a vehicle without an engine.

I grew up in a very cultural household, but part of our culture is that we don't really take photos.

I haven't studied history - I couldn't give a discourse in medieval literature - but I am a personal historian, and I do a lot to take in the histories of the people around me.

I don't think I've ever spoken to anyone who's told me that the story of 'Roots' isn't important.

If I wait for the great definitive story of my people to come around, I'm never going to work.

I believe that culture begins in the cradle . . .To do without tales and stories and books is to lose humanity's past, is to have no star map for our future.

For black folks, the camera provided a means to document a reality that could, if necessary, be packed, stored, moved from place to place... [Photography] offered a way to contain memories, to overcome loss, to keep history.

Memory feeds a culture, nourishes hope and makes a human, human.