"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."

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

"So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history."

— Henry Louis Gates
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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."

— Henry Louis Gates
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"Diversity doesn't mean black and white only."

— Henry Louis Gates
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"But you see, our society is still trapped in this binary, black/white logic and that has had some very positive implications for our generation. It's had some very negative ones as well and one of the negative ones is that it creates enormous identity problems for people who have one black ancestor and all white ancestors for example."

— Henry Louis Gates
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More about Nature

"To destroy is still the strongest instinct in nature."

— Max Beerbohm
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"I love the game, it's the greatest game on earth, that's why I can't understand all of this talk about trying to make the game better. People talk about the high strike zone and changing this and that. Why? To speed up the game? That's the beauty of baseball. There is no time element."

— Eric Davis
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"The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit."

— Aristotle
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"The world is too much with us late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours."

— William Wordsworth
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