“When I saw corruption, I was forced to find truth on my own. I couldn’t swallow the hypocrisy.”

Leave me alone. I’m fine.

We forget that this music, music made by my brothers and sisters, is still a baby. It’s just beginning. When I think of the possibilities, it makes me smile.

I’m so thankful that your mine, your sweetness is my weakness.

You’re the first, the last, and my everything and the answer to all my dreams. You’re my sun, my moon, my guiding star, my kind of wonderful, that’s what you are

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.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

All Earthquakes and Disasters are warnings; there’s too much corruption in the world.

There is no swifter route to the corruption of thought than through the corruption of language.

A man who has never gone to school may steal a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.

Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.

I wish to raise a Black man who will not be destroyed by, nor settle for, those corruptions called power by the white fathers who mean his destruction as surely as they mean mine.

When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer ‘Present’ or ‘Not Guilty’.

Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both.