Ah! if the pulpit would practice what it preaches, then all would be well.

Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident, and riches take wings. Only one thing endures and that is character.

It is impossible to enslave, mentally or socially, a bible-reading people. The principles of the bible are the groundwork of human freedom.

Go West, young man, go West. There is health in the country, and room away from our crowds of idlers and imbeciles.

Common sense is very uncommon.

The darkest hour in any man's life is when he sits down to plan how to get money without earning it.

We are not one people. We are two peoples. We are a people for Freedom and a people for Slavery. Between the two, conflict is inevitable.

I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample underfoot.

A cigar has "...a fire at one end and a fool at the other."

Journalism kills you, but it keeps you alive as long as you're doing it.

Bigotry is chronic dogmatism.

I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles but today it means getting along with people.

Negro music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential. Nothing is sacred. After a decade, a musical idea, no matter how innovative, is threatened.

Take nothing for granted as beautiful or ugly.

One can live with the thought of one's own death. It is the thought of the death of the words and books that is terrifying for that is the deeper extinction.

To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.

I go to the studio everyday because one day I may go and the Angel will be there. What if I don't go and the Angel comes?

I got rabies shots for biting the head off a bat but that's OK - the bat had to get Ozzy shots.

Visualising something organises one's ability to accomplish it.

One of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use what have been called "weasel words."

After Sandy hit, my wife and I saw pictures of the devastation following the hurricane in the news. We immediately wanted to find a way to assist those in need.