I took two important phone calls while in the shower today because I'm a goddam professional.

Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one

Make at least one definite move daily toward your goal.

A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday does not know where it is today.

Mr. Blair, I look upon secession as anarchy. If I owned the four millions of slaves in the South, I would sacrifice them all to the Union; but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native State?

There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil.

A land without memories is a people without liberty.

Remember, we are all one country now. Dismiss from your mind all sectional feeling, and bring them up to be Americans.

I have always observed that wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find the white man, you see everything around him improving.

You cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it.

Everybody wants happiness, and nobody wants pain, but you can't have a rainbow without a little rain.

We gardeners are healthy, joyous, natural creatures. We are practical, patient, optimistic. We declare our optimism every year, every season, with every act of planting.

I feel like my behavior goes over better on the streets of New York.

Love is the natural occupation of the man of leisure.

We humans, you see, have an infinite capacity for self-rationalization.

To listen to your own silence is the key to comedy.

You hate Jesus because someone from the North Country said He was the Son of God. But you hate one another because each of you deems himself too great to be the brother of the next man.

Very suddenly. Yes, quite suddenly, I didn't feel like I could handle my feeling of aloneness.

Sleeping or waking, we hear not the airy footsteps of the strange things that almost happen.

I think my songwriting has developed over the years. As I get older, I have become less afraid to share real experiences.

I've always been a MC that wrote socially and politically aware songs, although I listen to all types of hip-hop. This time around I got tracks that make me say "Tupac Shakur would be proud."