I didn't want to be a big record mogul and all that stuff. I just wanted to write songs and make people laugh.

I have this ability to find this hidden talent in people that sometimes even they didn't know they had.

Money had never been the main thing for me. It's the legacy that was important.

Motown was about music for all people – white and black, blue and green, cops and the robbers. I was reluctant to have our music alienate anyone.

There aren’t enough people who care about the future. They are too busy worrying about today and what they can grab now

Michael Jackson was not an artist who comes along once in a decade, a generation, or a lifetime. He was an artist who comes along only once, period… He raised the bar and then BROKE the bar!

The whole purpose of writing a book is to be understood - if other people write about you, they try to guess why you did things, or they hear things from other people.

Today's business climate is not for me.

I'm a songwriter, that's what I love.

All artists have runners, people that tell them what to do, business managers, lawyers, these - if they get the right ones, they're lucky, and if they get the wrong ones, they're unlucky.

Motown was about music for all people - white and black, blue and green, cops and the robbers. I was reluctant to have our music alienate anyone.

You're a dangerous fool who should be sent west, " he told the unconscious man. "You have forgotten the face of your father.

You don't begin by dehumanizing those who are dehumanizing you, because it contributes to the cycle of dehumanization in the world.

Nothing is difficult to mortals; we strive to reach heaven itself in our folly. [Lat., Nil mortalibus arduum est; Coelum ipsum petimus stultitia.]

I'm a real big electronic music nut; when I was young I listened to musique concrète, German music from Cologne in the early 50s, all kinds of stuff.

I was a boy soprano. I had a natural kind of voice and then trained it after my voice changed.

The modest youth somehow knows just what to do for the cameras.

All the problems we face in the United States today can be traced to an unenlightened immigration policy on the part of the American Indian.

The dinner party is a suburban form of entertainment. Its spread in our big cities represents an insidious Fifth Column suburbanization of the metropolis.

The true is inimitable, the false untransformable.

Why not Bill Gates for president? There are so many businesses' that empower charities. How many men give away all their money to charities? Why not them for President?