But there are a number of attitudes that should not be emotionally or psychologically ingested by young people.

You can meet a young person who goes to school and is really enthusiastic, but if a sufficiently strong personality convinces them that this is a waste of time, that person might flunk out.

If there's an intellectual highway, there's also an intellectual subway.

You'd never know that listening to people in the UN but tribalism is the father of racism.

Rap actually comes out of punk rock, not black music.

As you know from reading many of these Negro writers, we don't deal too much with the discussion of democracy and what it means and how improvisation fits in all that.

When a violent minority that crosses color lines comes to believe that killing those you know or do not know is a reasonable solution to problems, we are in need of another vision.

Your ethnic or sexual identity, what region of the country you're from, what your class is - those aspects of your identity are not the same as your aesthetic identity.

Our society has gotten to the point where we might soon become less and less shocked by any kind of violence.

When you're artistic director of a program, you present the music you want to present.

All of us are made up of the stories that we listen to, the ones we disagree with and the ones that we agree with.

The philosophy of a person speaks of what dictates or governs how and what someone believes.

You are called and only you can fulfill your calling

Gin a body meet a bodyComing thro' the rye, Gin a body kiss a body— Need a body cry?

Sincerity is simplicity.

The music for me is paradise. I think it's where God lives.

I see myself as the world's oldest living teenager... I try to get as much kick out of things as possible.

Despite the never ending play of conscious correction and instruction, the surrounding atmosphere and spirit is in the end the chief agent in forming manners.

In New York in the Forties or Fifties, everybody's in a suit, an overcoat and a hat.

The sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society.

Educate yourself on what's going on around the world where children are dying. Educate yourself on what's going on in Africa.