“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.

I don’t believe the United States will be ready to join Russia in fighting terrorists in Syria.

Fight the fighters, not their wars.

The Russians are fighting for us, for the world, and for their self.

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.

Al-Qaeda has one ideology and they go back to the same leadership in Afghanistan or in Syria or in Iraq. That’s the question. You have tens of thousands of foreigners, that’s definitely correct. We are fighting them on the ground and we know this.

A man from the west will fight over three things: water, women and gold, and usually in that order.

I’ve faced the grief, I’ve faced the anger, and I’m ready to keep up the fight because America is worth fighting for.

The Germans could not get over the perfidy of it. It was unbelievable that the English, having degenerated to the stage where suffragettes heckled the Prime Minister and defied the police, were going to fight.