“The whole system of society tells you what to do.”

As a boy, I believed freedom for America meant freedom for me. There was a time I believed every word spoken.

Mama tried to save us from the streets, but the streets were too strong.

There’s a time when people give their words to each other it has to mean something. I’m a street cat. I’ve belonged in gangs and when you had a partner, you went down with your partner whether you won the fight or lost it. You went down together.

I’ve always loved War’s Low Rider and Sly Stone’s Thank You, and I just wanted to put my take on them.

A kid who was on welfare, because he refused to steal anybody’s property or take anybody’s money. You found life a lot tougher.

Elton John’s opinion turned the label’s opinion around, all in a day.

I went to jail at 16 for stealing tires off Cadillacs. When I got out I said, Never again.

I didn’t mind working in the clubs, but I resented it being a club where pimps hang out. Because the music that I create is of a higher intellect than that. It not only encompasses pimps, but whores, ballplayers, executives… everybody.

Blacks own so little of the music business, it’s pathetic. But I see that changing soon. Black artists, black businessmen and women will unite.

When I commit, I commit with my whole heart, my whole being. I know the Bible like the back of my hand.

I quit high school on my birthday. It was my senior year and I didn’t see the point. This was 1962, and I was ready to make music.

No one could understand the bond between me and my brother. I struggled to understand the forces that drove his soul in one direction and mine in another.

The women used the music to get their men to relate to them better: “talk to me, tell me what’s on your mind.”

It’s ecstasy when you’re laying down next to me.

One preacher turned me on, another turned me off.

We are all gods, all forces of nature. We can destroy, we can build. We are like oceans and like fires.

But that is the only thing that slows me down is the system. No one, two or three was big enough to slow me down, only the system. It was the system that slowed me down to make my numbers fall. Not because I am older.

The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or creative consciousness.

The numeric system was invented to help man to put order in the chaos of the world.

Southerners are the more lonely and spiritually estranged, I think, because we have lived so long in an artificial social system that we insisted was natural and right and just – when all along we knew it wasn’t.

Indians, of course, have no “theology,” and indeed no word for the system of credulity in which the white priests arrange for God, who must be entirely bewildered by it, a series of excuses for his failures.

We cannot know the young child’s personality by studying his systems of interest, for his attention is as yet too labile, his reactions impulsive, and interests unformed.

An act cannot be defined by the end sought by the actor, for an identical system of behaviour may be adjustable to too many different ends without altering its nature.

I think the first and principle objective is to repeal Obamacare before it does lasting, fundamental damage to our health care system, to our individual liberty, to the relationship each of us has with his or her doctor.