John Henrik Clarke Quotes

I don't consider myself a racist, I don't hate other peoples, but I certainly want to preserve my own. And I think that's true of all people.

Why should he not justly know his race’s own heroes rather than through false teaching think them wrong? Have they not as much claim to valor as Hercules or Achilles? Now I do not say here that everything he has natively is right or better than the Caucasian’s. Not at all, but I do say that there are noble qualities and traits and a set of literary traditions he had which are just as fine and finer, and when he has these, or the sake of keeping a fine spirit of self-respect and pride in himself, let us preserve them.

It may not be art, but it is history.

People looked up to us for our values and leadership. But today, they laugh as we are busy debating whether one of the seven wonders of the world, the Taj Mahal, was actually built by Indians.

I'm the black dude that loves old black culture. I also love old white culture. I just love history, but I'm the guy that wants to bring things back and push them forward.

To be at the forefront of something that can spark a major change as far as kids going to an HBCU and learning about our history and learning about our culture and learning about our ancestors, where we came from - that's a big thing, that's a really big thing.

We must link Azamgarh to art and culture and not with terrorism and crime.

It is not for us . . . to send out missionaries to foreign peoples; it is our task to build up our own Western culture.

Aboriginal people have much to celebrate in this country's British heritage

I'll tell you what I like about Chinese people: they're hanging in there with the chop sticks, aren't they? You know they've seen the fork. They're staying with the sticks.

The loss of the culture is one of the main reasons Ciro Guerra wanted to tell their story.

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.

We should see to it that our people are steeped in a real knowledge and understanding of our national culture.

It's depressing to see blacks wanting to dive into the mainstream of American commercial life. They come from a magnificent African culture based on aesthetics, and they all want to become fort builders like the vicious people who originally enslaved them.

Historia (Inquiry); so that the actions of of people will not fade with time.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them.

My parents sent me to a school across town, an integrated school, where I had the chance to meet and grow up with people who were from other parts of the world. ... I remember feeling that I would never have anything to contribute on St. Patrick's Day. I couldn't tell the stories that they might have been telling about their forebears and I felt left out.

A nation is the sum of its memories, and when those memories are allowed to die, it is less of a nation.

The basis of national identity is to say, "This is authentic to me or my forebears," and is there even such a thing? How authentic is it to your life? Just because your grandfather did it, what does that have to do with you? If I say I'm working in the style of Rembrandt, so what? You can say it, but are you really? No, because when you try to literally copy a cultural artifact, you change it. It dissolves, and then who's looking at it? People who appreciate that kind of drawing, or people it means nothing to?

It's like we're suffering from an identity crisis, and that identity is in our arts and the fact that we don't find it chief amongst our agendas to teach our kids who we are as a nation and the battles we've had on this ground and how they've been successfully resolved. We can't enjoy the fruits of the labor of our ancestors.

The richest people in the world build networks. Everyone else is trained to look for work, that's why there are two types of people today. Those who build their own dreams and those who build someone else dreams.

The American dream has always depended on the dialogue between the present and the past. In our architecture, as in all our other arts-indeed, as in our political and social culture as a whole-ours has been a struggle to formulate and sustain a usable past.

Today, nobody cares about European culture. We have a tradition, a vision, a culture of the past, we have legacy, but we don't have a present culture and we don't have a future.

Just as a tree without roots is dead, a people without history or cultural roots also becomes a dead people.

In Brazil, there is a fear and a denial of our past. Downtown Rio used to display the history of colonialism in Brazil. They had beautiful buildings and theaters, and there was a bakery that was threatened to be demolished, but people insisted against it. They laid down in front of it and said, "You're going to have to go over my body to destroy it." It frustrates me when I see people on Facebook posing in front of old buildings while on vacation, because they could've posed in front of equally beautiful buildings at home in Rio.