"The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African-American we have ever researched."

Nature

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Thematic Reflection

This quotation examines the core nature of Nature as articulated by Henry Louis Gates. Within historical and literary traditions, reflections on Nature provide actionable mental models, challenging individuals to evaluate personal ethics, self-discipline, and daily actions.

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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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More by Henry Louis Gates

"Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice."

— Henry Louis Gates
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"If Martin Luther King came back, he'd say we need another civil rights movement built on class not race."

— Henry Louis Gates
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"My family and our neighbors and friends thought of Africa and its Africans as extensions of the stereotyped characters that we saw in movies and on television in films such as 'Tarzan' and in programs such as 'Ramar of the Jungle' and 'Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.'"

— Henry Louis Gates
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"I knew that there were black people in Africa, of course, unfortunately because of movies such as 'Tarzan.'"

— Henry Louis Gates
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More about Nature

"When you make the finding yourself - even if you're the last person on Earth to see the light - you'll never forget it."

— Carl Sagan
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"You know it's only 50 miles from Grand River to Canton, but it took me 67 years to travel that distance."

— Don Shula
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"Quantum computation is... a distinctively new way of harnessing nature... It will be the first technology that allows useful tasks to be performed in collaboration between parallel universes."

— David Deutsch
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"We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state."

— Ralph Waldo Emerson
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