“If you’re sitting in that audience ready to fight me from the very beginning, I’m going to have a hard time getting to you. But if you’ve got a heart at all, I’m going to get it.”

If it wasn’t for hustlers, gangsters & gamblers there’d be no Jazz. Wasn’t middle~class who said Let’s go hear Bird tonight.

This is our culture, and I don’t care who the musician is, if he avoids black people, then he is scared of something. He doesn’t have confidence in himself or else he doesn’t believe in what he’s doing.

After me there are no more jazz singers . . . It’s a crime that no little singer is back there sockin’ it to me in my field. To keep it going, to keep it alive, because I’m not going to live forever.

A man’s greatest battles are the ones he fights within himself.

They’re a symbol of the whole town, pretending to fight, love, weep and laugh all the time – and they’re phonies, all of them. And I head the list…their phony hearts were dripping with the milk of human kindness.

We’re living through a time where we are fighting wars fostered by politics, admittedly not on the same scale as the First World War, but with equally tragic realities for our soldiers and their families.

You learn nothing about someone by the way they win the fight, you learn everything about the way they lose and keep coming back.

The benefit of appointing a hawkish central banker is the increased inflation-fighting credibility that such an appointment brings.

We have a great objective – the light on the hill – which we aim to reach by working for the betterment of mankind not only here but anywhere we may give a helping hand. If it were not for that, the Labour movement would not be worth fighting for.

I think I’m aware of what goes on in my mind more than some guys, and for that reason I fight more battles.

Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.