“What kept me sane was knowing that things would change, and it was a question of keeping myself together until they did.”

I tell you what freedom is to me: no fear.

I look forward to doing my own show, not someone else’s. That’s always been my dream.

I would like you to know, I am a doctor of music.

I think the rich are too rich and the poor are too poor. I don’t think the black people are going to rise at all; I think most of them are going to die.

If I get an idea I put it on tape and somebody else writes it out.

I’m a real rebel with a cause.

When a child is gifted, people try to help that child.

Theory and harmony broadened my mind in music. I know what music is made of.

How do you explain what it feels like to get on the stage and make poetry that you know sinks into the hearts and souls of people who are unable to express it.

Talent is a burden not a joy. I am not of this planet. I do not come from you. I am not like you.

I know I’m different, but I don’t think about it.

I was not reluctant to become a singer. Singing has been an activity I’ve done my whole life, without thought.

Music is the center of my life.

That’s a very high goal to have, study eight hours a day to be a concert pianist.

Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking the new inventive phrases we make up to describe things – all that to me is jazz just as much as the music we play.

Slavery has never been abolished from America’s way of thinking.

I’m scared of him,” said Piggy, “and that’s why I know him. If you’re scared of someone you hate him but you can’t stop thinking about him. You kid yourself he’s all right really, an’ then when you see him again; it’s like asthma an’ you can’t breathe.

Fascism is a religion. The twentieth century will be known in history as the century of Fascism.

Sometimes it involves giving up everything you have ever known, or everyone you have ever loved for the sake of something greater.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

The problem with leaderless uprisings taking over is that you don’t always know what you get at the other end. If you are not careful you could replace a bad government with one much worse!

It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.

They’re thinking of turning the peasant into an educated man. Why, first of all they should make him a good and prosperous farmer and then he’ll learn all that is necessary for him to know.

How did we arrive at this, that the best leader is the one that knows how to beg for a share of what he has already given away at the price of a broken tool? Where is the future of Africa?