“You know, it felt like him reverting back to what was in his bones and that’s, you know, optimism and a deep belief in, you know, American institutions and the American people.”

You know, the thing I always think about, you get up early in the morning to go to work and there’s some dude outside drinking and you come home and the same dude is outside drinking hanging on the corner. And then this engenders a level of anger I think and a level of shame.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.

I don’t know how you bridge that contradiction, but I felt that Barack Obama was sincere. It didn’t feel like a line to me.

I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.

I think the sad fact is, there’s a long history in this country at looking at African-American as subhuman.

Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains-whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.

My mom used to tell me, I can’t use this phrase on the radio – but basically don’t be one of those dudes hanging on the corner.

They’re right there waiting for it. A community of people who’ve been denied wealth, denied wealth-building opportunities, are right there. And the banks went right after them.

I think the president [Barack Obama] adopted some of that same language, but took it into the White House.

Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin.

Racism is, among other things.

I want to be really, really clear about this. It doesn’t mean that everyone or even the majority of people who voted for Donald Trump are racist or white supremacists or anything like that. But what it means is that it’s not a mistake that Trump began his campaign with birthersism .

I did not know then that this is what life is – just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you’re swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles.

The symbolism was in – and this sounds really, really small, but it’s actually big for African-Americans – the symbolism was not in being an embarrassment, but to being a figure that folks were actually proud of.

Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.

The music industry’s very laid back while I’m very, very aggressive.

Mussolini, in 1935, went and then in the next year, conquered Ethiopia, acquiring himself a colony.

I’m always thinking, ‘my career is over, I have to move back to Omaha, and work on the railroad, with the rest of my family. So no, I’m never thinking I’ve ‘arrived.’ I think that’s a good way to be.

The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present.

I do like to keep mementos from my work, whether they be photos, the backs of make-up chairs or even props and clothes.

I’m a loser on Sunday. Yeah, I’m a couch potato. I get up and try and eat and then back on the couch. And watch anything.

Let’s just say that back in the old days, sex was available every two feet. But I never made love to anybody that did not want me to.

When I’m in power, here’s how I’m gonna put the country back on its feet. I’m going to put sterilizing agents in the following products: Sunny Delight, Mountain Dew, and Thick-Crust Pizza. Only the ‘tardiest of the ‘tards like the thick crust.