“I was an illegitimate, well, I still am an illegitimate child.”

Generally the whole entertainment business now is bland.

I used to love it when I walked down the street and construction workers would whistle.

I have to keep testing myself.

Even as a child, I found a way to survive.

I fight for other people better than I fight for myself.

In essence, I’m a sophisticated cotton picker.

I’m a dirt person. I trust the dirt. I don’t trust diamonds and gold.

I see them in my audience all the time, with the fur coat, a woman whose hand is always out front, or the two fingers are on the cheek to show her diamond. I don’t have anything against that.

When the people who are responsible for our country ask you a direct question, I expect them to accept a direct answer, not to be blackballed because you are telling the truth.

My recipe for life is not being afraid of myself, afraid of what I think or of my opinions.

Aging has a wonderful beauty and we should have respect for that.

We’re not thought of in terms of color because we are entertainers. We are there to entertain you not because we are black, white, pink, or green or gay or straight or because we are Catholic or Protestant.

Relationships can be rather uncomfortable for her. But, as Eartha Kitt, it’s fine. I can accept and reject any time I want to. Do I ever reject? Not really. Although people think I do!

In the ’50s, critics used to say I had a ‘dangerous’ act.

I have a great need for affection from an audience. I don’t know whether this is because I had such a tough life when I was a child.

I was a street dancer.

A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart.

As a kitten does what all other kittens do, so a child wants to do what other children do, with a wanting that is as powerful as it is mindless. Since we human beings have to learn what we do, we have to start out that way, but human mindfulness begins where that wish to be the same leaves off.

Rebirth. I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter through the white’s front door is not in the same category as the fact that the dead will never come back.

I always had the intuition, even as a little child, that I was called for a big project.

At every hour of every day, I can tell you on which page of which book each school child in Italy is studying.

Fifty percent of Winston is genius, fifty percent bloody fool. He will behave like a child.

When I was a child, I never played with other children. I hated them.

You would see me cover every Adele, Christina Aguilera, Taylor Swift and Carrie Underwood. Then I’d have to do ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ and ‘Crazy Train,’ and it was a really weird combination.