"All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian's footnotes, the number of examples of specific cases is very, very small."

Wisdom

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Insight & Reflection

Words carry weight, and Henry Louis Gates's insight into wisdom is no exception. It serves as a gentle reminder that amidst the chaos of modern life, timeless wisdom still holds the power to guide our decisions and clarify our values.

About Henry Louis Gates

Henry Louis Gates Jr., popularly known by his childhood nickname "Skip", is an American literary critic, professor, historian, and filmmaker who serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. He rediscovered the earliest known African-American novels and has published extensively on the recognition of African-American literature as part of the Western canon.

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Editorial Note: This quote is curated and fact-checked by the Quotes Archive Editorial Team. Verified Literature Specialist.

More by Henry Louis Gates

"The only people who live in a post-black world are four people who live in a little white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. The idea that America is post-racial or post-black because a man I admire, Barack Obama, is president of the United States, is a joke. And I hope no one will even wonder about this crazy fiction again."

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"You can say I had a severe case of 'Roots' envy. I wanted to be like Alex Haley, and I wanted to be able to... do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage, as I like to put it, and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa."

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"It's not white versus black any more, it's haves versus have-nots. Unless the black middle-classes unite to promote the interests of the black underclass, tension between them is inevitable. What we, the black middle class have to do, is think of a strategy to avert that."

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More about Wisdom

"It is a profound truth that kindness is the invisible thread that binds all kindred spirits together — an essential principle for the reflective life."

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