Orlando Patterson

“Praised across the humanities as a Renaissance scholar, Patterson has written globally influential books on slavery and its opposite pole, freedom. His works are profoundly interdisciplinary, mining comparative histories and insisting on the complex significance of culture.”

“Pessimism is a self-fulfilling malady.”

“The present wave of immigrants and their children are rapidly assimilating into an ever-vibrant American mainstream culture, and at a pace greater than the Europeans who came during the previous large wave”