If you're getting harassed, it's not helpful to know that racism has generally declined in America, when you're still experiencing it. That is a reality that we're still vulnerable to.

It is time for blacks to begin the shift from a wartime to a peacetime identity, from fighting for opportunity to the seizing of it.

Opportunity follows struggle. It follows effort. It follows hard work. It doesn't come before.

Every single progressive education fad of the past thirty years has hurt poor black children.

A black conservative is a black who dissents from the victimization explanation of black fate.

The promised land guarantees nothing. It is only an opportunity, not a deliverance.

My experience in life tells me that the values that are now being labeled 'conservative' are the only way that blacks can get ahead.

Freedom always carries a burden of proof, always throws us back on ourselves.

Liberalism has become a moral vaccine that immunizes people against stigmatization.

My honest opinion is that blacks have to fight much harder for their individuality than whites do.

I would love to see us, as blacks, get to the place where we say, 'I'm not going to play race games with you. Here I am. This is who I am. Take it or leave it.'

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.

Breakups can be sad, but sometimes tears are the price we pay for a freedom we need.

Every age needs men who will redeem the time by living with a vision of things that are to be.

Sometimes before we make a record I go back and listen to a few. It's equally humbling and uplifting.

Good comedy makes you laugh, and bad comedy makes people you hate laugh.

Nowhere more than in New York does the contest between squalor and splendor so sharply present itself.

Gone are the days when a gentleman lightly took your hand in his and brushed his lips across it, or tipped his hat to acknowledge you as he chivalrously stepped aside to let you pass.

A political man is disgusting, but a political wife, horrible.

When I was young I was trained in stage fighting and rapier and dagger, for several years.

I ain't scared of the fall / I've felt the ground before.