Henry Louis Gates Jr. Quotes

We really invented the genre of tracing family trees and going back as far as we could on the paper trail. When the paper trail disappeared, we used DNA analysis. The technology was just being invented that allowed you to trace ancestry through DNA.

I've always been fascinated by what you can learn from looking into your DNA.

My mother always said I must be part Mongolian because of my lotus-pale complexion and squid-ink black hair.

My family and I were some of the first people to be genotyped.

I received a most amusing postcard the other morning. Unfortunately, it was not signed in a readable manner so I cannot answer it privately. But it comes from Moblie, Ala., and says: 'Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: You have not answered my question, the amount of Negro blood you have in your veins, if any.' I am afraid none of us know how much nor what kind of blood we have in our veins, since chemically it is all the same. And most of us cannot trace our ancestry more than a few generations.

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.

There is a long history of how DNA sequencing can bring certainty to people's lives.

Everybody is going to want to look at their genetics. You're going to want to get a genetic profile.

With DNA, the ability to find out a lot more with a lot less has increased our ability for identification.

It can be very difficult to trace your birth parents.

I couldn't wait to look at someone who shared my genes. I thought my baby was going to provide a decoder key to my past. But then I looked at Pippa and realized, no, she's actually the key to my future.

We all want our genetic information. Why would you not want genetic information?

Our understanding of how DNA informs our health and development is advancing at an incredible pace.

I never dreamed that in my lifetime my own genome would be sequenced.

It turns out that every person alive today can trace his or her ancestry back to Africa. Everyone's DNA tells a story of a journey from an African homeland to wherever you live.

… race betterment … for those deemed to be descended from white persons who settled in the original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the Constitution.

All of our ancestors came from somewhere.

In the very traits of his temperament, which have a considerable effect on his life of soul, a person bears within him qualities and impulses that have an obvious connection with those of his physical ancestors.

My DNA is building a product and a service.

Through the years, I found we had Native American blood in us. My great-grandmother came from the island of Martinique, and they hooked up with the Native Americans of Louisiana.

I have been told for most of my life that the white man on my birth certificate is not my biological father and that my actual biological father is a light-skinned black man.

I'm descended from southern slaves, and I'm descended on my mother's side from northern European Protestant immigrants.

When I was 16, my dad took me to a DNA conference at the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco, California, and I was captivated by this way of looking at biology and by the discussions of bits of nucleic acid that could make us sick.

I'm a black American playwright. I couldn't be anything else. I make my art out of black American culture; they're all cut out of the same cloth. That's who I am; that's who I write about.

We're all where we come from. We all have our roots.