“You know, the thing I always think about, you get up early in the morning to go to work and there’s some dude outside drinking and you come home and the same dude is outside drinking hanging on the corner. And then this engenders a level of anger I think and a level of shame.”

What sets black people apart is not some deficit in personal responsibility. It’s the weight on our shoulders. That is what’s actually different. We have the weight and burden of history.

Addressing the moral failings of black people while ignoring the centuries-old failings of their governments amounts to a bait and switch.

You don’t just get the good part. You get the bad part, too. You get all of it.

You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.

Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America.

What it is is that Barack Obama was raised by a white mother and two white grandparents who, A, told him he was black and that there was nothing wrong with being black.

It was a week after Donald Trump had won. And initially he was still optimistic. He felt that things would be OK ultimately. And I have to tell you, this is the area where, you know, I see, you know, some degree of contradiction.

[Donald Trump] went on to, you know, otherize Muslims, otherize Latinos, otherize women, that he built out from that. And it can be true that a unique, you know, individual like Barack Obama can succeed in spite of that and still be the case that that force is quite, quite strong.

Any time you have, you know, upwards of 90 percent of a demographic voting against somebody, that’s a statement.

It was made that way. And what you have is a system in which people are there to be exploited.

[Winning the White House was an achievement], but as an African-American, [Barack Obama], I think the symbolism is in how he conducted himself.

And I think, like, there’s a crucial difference between being, you know, Joe Schmo in the neighborhood and being the head, you know, of the government that, you know, in many ways is largely responsible for those conditions in the first place.

The best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself.

Humans also tend to find community to be pleasurable, and within the boundaries of community relationships, words.

Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage.

Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

It is one to say you have faith and another to be in a tight corner and prove it.

When you walk the track and you see a corner and realise you were going round it at 160mph, you wonder who could be so stupid to take a corner at that speed. But in the car, you don’t even think about that.

I do not deny that many appear to have succeeded in a material way by cutting corners and by manipulating associates, both in their professional and in their personal lives.

That’s an exaggeration but there are times when you have to turn the corner and do an acoustic set.

I sit in a corner by myself and am tickled to death when someone comes over to talk to me.

As these machines leak into every corner of our lives, they will annoy us, infuriate us, and even kill a few of us.

I would box them into a corner with a badly formed question, and they didn’t know how to get out of it. Now, I let them take me through it step by step, and I listen.

I’ve seen enough things to know that if you just keep on going, if you turn the corner, the sun will be shining.