If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.

You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.

To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.

Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

Don't do what you can do - try what you can't do.

There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn't fool with booze until he's fifty; then he's a damn fool if he doesn't.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.

Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.

It is difficult to press forward if we do not know how to obey.

Why do I always feel like you're trying to staple my umbilical cord to the corner of your desk?

There were only so many ways a man‟s heart could break, and he had a feeling his couldn‟t survive another puncture.

I think all decision making is very instinctive, in the end.

Let every man remind their descendants that they also are soldiers who must not desert the ranks of their ancestors, or from cowardice fall behind.

So I went out and bought Hard Again by Muddy Waters. That was a big learning curve. I listened to that album again and again and again. James Cotton was the harmonica player on that album.

Bands-- enough with the crayon face-paint-- you're better than that.

The more pity, that fools may not speak wisely what wise men do foolishly.

I knew I was going to take the wrong train, so I left early.