The hardest thing about being James Brown is I have to live. I don’t have no down time.
I want to say to you: Help yourself, so you can help someone else.
Sometimes, you like to let the hair do the talking!
Music has to breathe and sweat. You have to play it live.
I’m a ghetto man who made good. I never forgot where I came from and who put me on top – God and Jack The Rapper.
Our silence is deafening and deadly.
Thank God that I had the ability to understand that I had a different beat and that I was a drummer.
When I’m on stage, I’m trying to do one thing: bring people joy.
My son don’t have to say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud. He don’t have to be called those crazy names.
You can take care of yourself, and God helps those who help themselves.
As I always said, if people wanted to know who James Brown is, all they have to do is listen to my music.
I used to think like Moses. That knocked me down for a couple years and put me in prison. Then I start thinking like Job. Job waited and became the wealthiest and richest man ever ’cause he believed in God.
Communism and fascism or nazism, although poles apart in their intellectual content, are similar in this, that both have emotional appeal to the type of personality that takes pleasure in being submerged in a mass movement and submitting to superior authority.
There exists a “fear of freedom” of selfhood, which makes people want to submerge themselves in the mass and confession is one of the obvious means by which they can do so, for thereby they lose those traits which cause them to feel separate.
Education teaches people how to think, while propaganda teaches people what to think.
Propaganda by censorship takes two forms: the selective control of information to favour a particular viewpoint, and the deliberate doctoring of information in order to create an impression different from that originally intended.
Every day you should be doing right what you recognized as wrong the day before. Obviously.
Harmony, balance, and rhythm. They’re the three things that stay with you your whole life. Without them civilization is out of whack. And that’s why an oarsman, when he goes out in life, he can fight it, he can handle life. That’s what he gets from rowing.
Perhaps the seeds of redemption lay not just in perseverance, hard work, and rugged individualism. Perhaps they lay in something more fundamental – the simple notion of everyone pitching in and pulling together.
Sure, I can make a boat,” he said, and then added, quoting the poet Joyce Kilmer, “’But only God can make a tree.