Top 61 Alex Haley Quotes
#1. I don't mind shaking hands with a human being, are you one?
Alex Haley
#2. It is the way of the world that goodness is often repaid by badness.
Alex Haley
#3. In the bush, trust no one you don't know.
Alex Haley
#4. You don't spend twenty years of your life in the service and not have a warm, nostalgic feeling left in you. It's a small service, and there's a lot of esprit de corps.
Alex Haley
#5. Raw, naked truth exchanged between the black man and the white man is what a whole lot more of is needed in this country - to clear the air of the racial mirages, cliches, and lies that this country's very atmosphere has been filled with for four hundred years.
Alex Haley
#6. Brown people wouldn't speak to someone who was black.
Alex Haley
#7. I acknowledge immense debt to the griots [tribal poets] of Africa - where today it is rightly said that when a griot dies, it is as if a library has burned to the ground.
Alex Haley
#8. I was weeping for all of history's incredible atrocities against fellowmen, which seems to be mankind's greatest flaw ...
Alex Haley
#9. Tying the little folks with the older folks is a great and powerful tool to preserve and to protect the family and the individual.
Alex Haley
#10. That's what happens with writing. Ingredients bubble and cook. Material becomes substance.
Alex Haley
#11. Unless we learn from history, we are destined to repeat it. This is no longer merely an academic exercise, but may contain our worlds fate and our destiny.
Alex Haley
#12. I think one of the most fascinating things you can do after you learn about your own people is to study something about the history and culture of other people.
Alex Haley
#13. Crazies always recognize each other. I think Melville said it, in a slightly different context: "Genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round." Of course, we're not talking about genius here, we're talking about crazies - but
Alex Haley
#14. I wasn't going to be one of those people who died wondering what if? I would keep putting my dreams to the test - even though it meant living with uncertainty and fear of failure. This is the shadowland of hope, and anyone with a dream must learn to live there.
Alex Haley
#15. You have to deal with the fact that your life is your life.
Alex Haley
#16. I think most people when you say slavery tend to see a group of anonymous people pulling cotton sacks in great plantation fields, and that is largely true.
Alex Haley
#17. Carrying little Kunta in his strong arms, he walked to the edge of the village, lifted his baby up with his face to the heavens, and said softly, "Fend kiling dorong leh warrata ka iteh tee." (Behold - the only thing greater than yourself.)
Alex Haley
#18. Roots is not just a saga of my family. It is the symbolic saga of a people.
Alex Haley
#19. Find the Good and Praise it" by Alex Haley
Alex Haley
#20. It's an hour during the week where you can just slow down.
Alex Haley
#21. Most of the things that are asked of me as a representative black person, would suggest never are we equal Americans.
Alex Haley
#22. He meant you no harm?" said Omoro.
"He acted very friendly," said the old man, "but the cat always eats the mouse it plats with.
Alex Haley
#23. I tell younger writers that indeed it is devastating to be rejected. You feel like the bottom dropped out of your world.
Alex Haley
#24. When you clench your fist, no one can put anything in your hand.
Alex Haley
#25. In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.
Alex Haley
#26. Indeed optimists rather than defeatists have produced the results for which serious genealogical research is best known.
Alex Haley
#27. I get interviewed a lot, and I found myself listening to what the interviewer is asking me, I'm analyzing what I'm being asked more than my response.
Alex Haley
#28. I can't feel Irish to save my soul, but it's a fact.
Alex Haley
#29. The anti-blackness has generated new forms of youth involvement in anti-whiteness, which in some cases is appalling.
Alex Haley
#30. I know that statistically, it has been proven that there is a tremendous amount of black on black crime within the inner cities.
Alex Haley
#31. Your attitude is everything. Believe in yourself and trust your material. To be a successful writer, write every single day where you feel like it or not. Never, never give up, and the world will reward you beyond your wildest dreams.
Alex Haley
#32. Every time an old person dies, it's like a library burning down.
Alex Haley
#33. I am really quite proud of most of the people I " know who have "made it," who do things to help people.
Alex Haley
#34. My fondest hope is that 'Roots' may start black, white, brown, red, yellow people digging back for their own roots. Man, that would make me feel 90 feet tall.
Alex Haley
#35. So Dad has joined the others up there. I feel that they do watch and guide, and I also feel that they join me in the hope that this story of our people can help alleviate the legacies of the fact that preponderantly the histories have been written by the winners.
Alex Haley
#36. If you need to know history, the real story of those before you, then you should go to the library and read newspaper clippings of someone like Muhammad Ali every day, then it might giver you some understanding of the man.
Alex Haley
#37. Nobody can do for little children what grandparents do. Grandparents sort of sprinkle stardust over the lives of little children.
Alex Haley
#38. We all suffer. If a man's wise, he learns from it.
Alex Haley
#39. Beginning writers must appreciate the prerequisites if they hope to become writers. You pay your dues - which takes years.
Alex Haley
#40. Playboy: Why are you smiling? Thompson: Am I smiling? Yeah, I guess I am ... well, it's fun to lose it sometimes.
Alex Haley
#41. Either you deal with what is the reality, or you can be sure that the reality is going to deal with you.
Alex Haley
#42. In my writing, as much as I could, I tried to find the good, and praise it.
Alex Haley
#43. Every death is like the burning of a library.
Alex Haley
#44. Never completely encircle your enemy. Leave him some escape, for he will fight even more desperately if trapped.
Alex Haley
#45. I look at my books the way parents look at their children. The fact that one becomes more successful than the others doesn't make me love the less successful one any less.
Alex Haley
#46. The main thing you got to remember is that everything in the world is a hustle.
Alex Haley
#47. Racism is taught in our society ... it is not automatic.
It is learned behavior toward persons with
dissimilar physical characteristics.
Alex Haley
#48. Is this how you repay my goodness
with badness?" cried the boy. "Of course," said the crocodile out of the corner of his mouth. "That is the way of the world.
Alex Haley
#49. You can never enslave somebody who knows who he is.
Alex Haley
#50. When you start about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth.
Alex Haley
#52. There was a great deal of inbreeding between the Indians and the slaves. Genetically speaking, black people are some part black, some part European.
Alex Haley
#53. My parents were teachers and they went out of their way to see to it that I had books. We grew up in a home that was full of books. And so I learned to read. I loved to read.
Alex Haley
#54. Most of us prefer to be as quiet as possible about giving, because every time it's publicized that we do something, if it's something of the nature of giving, we'll be doubly besieged, and you really get sick of being always criticized no matter what you do.
Alex Haley
#55. Anytime you see a turtle up on top of a fence post, you know he had some help.
Alex Haley
#56. If you go back to before mankind came out of the cave, there was hatred.
Alex Haley
#58. In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage- to know who we are and where we have come from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.
Alex Haley
#59. Early in the spring of 1750, in the village of Juffure, four days upriver from the coast of The Gambia, West Africa, a manchild was born to Omoro and Binta Kinte.
Alex Haley
#60. Through this flesh, which is us, we are you, and you are us!
Alex Haley
#61. The way to succeed is never quit. Thats it. But really be humble about it.
Alex Haley
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