“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.”

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.

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.

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.

I have always believed that anybody with a little guts and the desire to apply himself can make it, can make anything he wants to make of himself.

Well, there’s a little bit of man in every woman and a little bit of woman in every man.

The fanatics for progress often have too little appreciation of the existing.

History must repeat itself because we pay such little attention to it the first time.

When the house of a great one collapses Many little ones are slain.

There is always a little more toothpaste in the tube. Think about it.

I do think that stand-up comedy in general heavily favors masculinity and so I like to act a little feminine onstage.

I definitely can feel the third or fourth feminist wave in the air, so maybe this is a good time to open that Pandora’s box a little bit and air it out.