A Quote by Henry Louis Gates

So when you do your family tree and Margaret Cho does hers, and... Wanda Sykes and John Legend... we're adding to the database that scholars can then draw from to generalize about the complexity of the American experience. And that's the contribution that family trees make to broader scholarship.

Henry Louis Gates

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About Adding American American Experience Broader Complexity Contribution Database Does Draw Experience Family Generalize Hers John Legend Make Margaret Our Family Scholars Scholarship Then Tree Trees Your

Quote Author

Henry Louis Gates
American - Critic
Born: September 16, 1950

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

Henry Louis Gates

[An article about Cho] started out, "Funny, sexy, zaftig Margaret Cho..." What is "zaftig?" Isn't that German for "big fat pig?" I guess I was lucky - "zaftig" is kind of a nice word. It could have been, "Funny, sexy, OBESE Margaret Cho."

Margaret Cho

When you hear "Seinfield," no one says, "the Jewish comic." You talk about Cedric the Entertainer, you don't say, "African American comedian Cedric the Entertainer." Even Margaret Cho - who's like one of three Korean performers out there - no one refers to her like that. They say, "It's Margaret Cho."

Gabriel Iglesias

A psychiatrist once asked me to draw a picture of my family. This is when I was a member of a family of four. I drew the three other people in the family first, bodies and heads. And then, last, I began to draw myself - but gave up.

Jamaica Kincaid

We hear a lot in this country about family, and 'American Family' just shows us a portrait we haven't seen as much of yet. 'American Family' lets us know that being American isn't about the color of your hair or eyes or skin: it's really a state of mind.

Esai Morales

Being an American is a state of mind, and to be in a family is to feel the power of belonging, the power of your roots. Family is a tree, the strength of a tree, the roots, the leaves, the past and the present, the future, the fruits, the seeds.

Esai Morales

No matter your situation, you can make family history a part of your life right now. Primary children can draw a family tree. Youth can participate in proxy baptisms. They can also help the older generation work with computers. Parents can relate stories of their lives to their posterity. Worthy adult members can hold a temple recommend and perform temple ordinances for their own kin.

Russell M. Nelson

He that raises a large family does, indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too.

Benjamin Franklin

In one way or another, everybody has this experience in their lives... the moment when you have to define your relationship to family and how your family's made you who you are, whether you've spent your life running from your family or deeply connected to your family.

Alex Kurtzman

The choices that you make with your family today will determine the quality of life in your family tree for generations to come.

Steve Farrar

So many American plays are about family. When you're in the first part of your life, you write about family a lot. I find with my absurdist plays that I was actually writing about my family, but so disguised I didn't realize it myself.

Christopher Durang

But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It. . . . Does the tree then have consciousness, similar to our own? I have no experience of that. But thinking that you have brought this off in your own case, must you again divide the indivisible? What I encounter is neither the soul of a tree nor a dryad, but the tree itself.

Martin Buber

Television's contribution to family life has been an equivocal one. For while it has, indeed, kept the members of the family from dispersing, it has not served to bring them together. By its domination of the time families spend together, it destroys the special quality that distinguishes one family from another, a quality that depends to a great extent on what a family does, what special rituals, games, recurrent jokes, familiar songs, and shared activities it accumulates.

Marie Winn

It's hard for me to generalize about kids and divorce. I think every family's experience is different; some kids are devastated by it, others relieved, and so forth, no matter what generation they're from.

Kate Christensen

I would like to see ... an entirely different procedure which is that we vote on the budget and decide how much we are going to spend, first, the way any family does, and then fit our priorities into what we think we have to spend. Instead, what we do, is to do it incrementally, starting at the bottom, adding and adding and adding. ... Until we get the support of all the authorities in this House to decide, first, what we think this country can afford and then decide where the amount is going to be allocated, we will never have common sense in this House.