I take my fundamental cue from John Coltrane that says there must be a priority of integrity, honesty, decency, and mastery of craft.
The most dangerous thing in American society is a self-respecting and self-loving black person, because they’re on the road to freedom and that means they’re gonna run up against the powers that be.
If you view life as a gold rush, you’re going to end up worshiping a golden calf.
I had a passion and love of learning and wisdom that was inseparable from a love of music and the arts. I’ve never viewed them in any way as being separable.
As human beings, everyone has stuff coming at them, and a certain kind of fear.
I’m a bluesman, which means that I put an emphasis on the minor keys.
The problem is that in America is that the nation state has been so weak when it comes to the history of big markets the history of big business in a way so we have a very weak welfare state compared to European nation states.
I’m not a pacifist at all; I think there is a notion of “just war” that can be persuasively argued. I think in the face of Nazis, in the face of apartheid, that I would have joined those armies. But that’s the last, last resort.
Playboy has a long history of high-quality interviews along with the objectification of women, and so I think she does have a point there. I don’t think that the words are necessarily nullified. It’s just that that context is something you ought to be suspicious of.
If we can’t get back to principles and integrity and it’s reduced just the interest of calculation and Machiavellian manipulation, we are in deep trouble.
We’re talking about a prison-industrial complex. We’re talking about a war on drugs that’s generating unprecedented levels of incarcerated folk. We’re talking about dilapidated housing. We’re talking about joblessness and underemployment.
You’re trying to just leave the world a little better.
I’m black, so, you know, I’m again with black folk, but it’s a love that spills over to vanilla suburbs and red reservations and brown barrios and yellow slices.
There’s simply no philosophizing without a love of wisdom, absolutely.
Rap is just a movement within the larger culture of hip-hop.
Love is fundamentally a death of an old self that was isolated and the emergence of a new self now entangled with another self, the self that you fall in love with.
I’m actually with the classics in general in terms of understanding truth in an existential mode. Therefore, philosophy becomes more a way of life as opposed to simply a mode of discourse.
I grew up in traditional black patriarchal culture and there is no doubt that I’m going to take a great many unconscious, but present, patriarchal complicities to the grave because it so deeply ensconced in how I look at the world. Therefore, very much like alcoholism, drug addiction, or racism patriarchy is a disease and we are in perennial recovery and relapse. So you have to get up every morning and struggle against it.
I’m a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebration- joy and pain sit side by side. The blues started off in some field, some plantation, in some mind, in some imagination, in some heart. The blues blew over to the next plantation, and then the next state. The blues went south to north, got electrified and even sanctified. The blues got mixed up with jazz and gospel and rock and roll.
QUALITY leadership is neither the product of one great individual nor the result of odd historical accidents. Rather, it comes from deeply bred traditions and communities that shape and mold talented and gifted persons. Without a vibrant tradition of resistance passed on to new generations, there can be no nurturing of a collective and critical consciousness – only professional conscientiousness survives.