“Selfishness can be a virtue. Selfishness is essential to survival, and without survival we cannot protect those whom we love more than ourselves.”

It’s like an act of murder – you play with intent to commit something.

You have to stop listening in categories. The music is either good or it’s bad.

Without a deadline, baby, I wouldn’t do nothing.

A musical profit outweighs a financial loss.

Playing ‘bop’ is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.

I’m sure critics have their purpose, and they’re supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what he did.

Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It’s not an occupation or profession, it’s a compulsion.

Everyone prays in their own language, and there is no language that God does not understand.

Every man prays in his own language.

Love is indescribable and unconditional. I could tell you a thousand things that it is not, but not one that it is. Either you have it or you haven’t; there’s no proof of it.

Jazz today, as always in the past, is a matter of thoughtful creation, not mere unaided instinct.

Jazz is a good barometer of freedom.

Of the One O’Clock Lab Band after hearing their performance, and sitting in with them at the White House: “I wish it were mine”.

You’ve got to find a way of saying it without saying it.

I fluffed off the guy who kept requesting tunes all night, then found out he was the King’s son.

Music is my mistress and she plays second fiddle to no one.

I didn’t fit in anywhere when I grew up, but I was always American, so to survive,

There are evils that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever… money, for instance, or war.

A Religion of Evolution: that, when all is said and done, is what Man needs ever more explicitly if he is to survive and ‘superlive,’ as soon as he becomes conscious of his power to ultra-hominize himself and of his duty to do so.

Humanity at the centre of the primates, Homo sapiens, in humanity, is the end-product of a gradual work of creation, the successive sketches for which still surround us on every side.

At the extreme temperature occurring in the stars, matter can only survive in its most dissociated states. Only simple bodies exist on these incandescent stars.

We wouldn’t be able to survive. We would have a hard time surviving if we were transported to the time when dinosaurs were around.

If we could magically transport ourselves back to the young Earth, when it was only a billion years old or two billion years old or three billion years old or four billion years old.

For humans, the Arctic is a harshly inhospitable place, but the conditions there are precisely what polar bears require to survive – and thrive. ‘Harsh’ to us is ‘home’ for them.