Rap actually comes out of punk rock, not black music.
Our democratic richness arrives when we’re able to comprehend our collective humanity accurately.
What we need in America is a renaissance. We need to go forward by going backward.
You must be willing to accept the fact that pain is a part of the process of revelation.
Popular culture tells you that schools and parents don’t know what’s going on, the police are dogs, politicians are all liars and scum, and any crime that’s not committed by the Mafia is done by the CIA.
The point is, you have an ethnic heritage and you have a human heritage. Your human heritage includes everything of human value.
If you’re going to get in the ring and try to take the belt, you have to prepare to get hit.
The grand irony, however, is that Southern segregation was not brought to an end, nor redneck violence dramatically reduced, by violence.
But there are a number of attitudes that should not be emotionally or psychologically ingested by young people.
Our society has gotten to the point where we might soon become less and less shocked by any kind of violence.
When a violent minority that crosses color lines comes to believe that killing those you know or do not know is a reasonable solution to problems, we are in need of another vision.
But the myth of violent solutions as the ultimate solutions maintains itself in much of popular media.
All of us are made up of the stories that we listen to, the ones we disagree with and the ones that we agree with.
Everybody has to be reminded that there’s another way to be. Another more mysterious, unpredictable way to be that’s not necessarily based upon contrivances.
Getting to the pint where the other is not the enemy is a big leap.
I don’t know any women who don’t think about what they look like, and I don’t know any men who don’t think about what women look like.
I wanted to get to that aesthetic proposition that comes out of learning the human elements of a world, so that those notes and rhythms mean something to you besides just the academic way in which they fall in place.
In America, we have to learn to be patient enough to figure out what somebody is saying. Somebody might actually be saying something.
If there’s an intellectual highway, there’s also an intellectual subway.
Louis Armstrong, who learned to be in exquisite dress, came from the bottom, and he’s not a trash can.
We cannot allow our public schools to remain in such bad shape and then wonder why we are having so many social problems.