When I was a boy, I was taught never to use insulting expressions like, ‘I’ve been gypped,’ or, ‘He welshed on the deal.’
I won’t say I’m out of condition now – but I even puff going downstairs.
I’m not a comic. I’m a humorist.
You know why Madison Avenue advertising has never done well in Harlem? We’re the only ones who know what it means to be Brand X.
I consider myself always a humorist. And I think anybody who tells jokes or makes people laugh is humor.
That’s easy, to stand in a nightclub, where most of the people that come in, they came to see you.
America is 5 percent of the world’s population and consumes 96 percent of the world’s hard drugs.
Hell hath no fury like a liberal scorned.
It was an unwritten law that black comics were not permitted to work white nightclubs. You could sing and you could dance, but you couldn’t stand flat-footed and talk; that was a no-no.
Baseball is very big with my people. It figures. It’s the only way we can get to shake a bat at a white man without starting a riot.
I believe young voters will either vote for Obama or not vote at all. So the problem is not Obama the problem is the system. If you think about how mess up this country is, most folk really don’t have choices.
Makes you wonder. When I left St. Louis, I was making five dollars a night. Now I’m getting $5,000 a week – for saying the same things out loud I used to say under my breath.
When you have a good mother and no father, God kind of sits in. It’s not good enough, but it helps. But I got tired of hearing Momma say, God, fix it so I can pay the rent; God, fix it so the lights will be turned on; God, fix it so the pot is full. I kind of felt it really wasn’t His job.
They told me there was very little racial prejudice in Hawaii. Like a woman is just a little bit pregnant.
Every door of racial prejudice I can kick down, is one less door that my children have to kick down.
When you shoot right and truth and justice down, the more right and truth and justice will rise up.
I guess that makes me as white as you now, boy. I got your spit inside me.
Home was a place to be only when all other places were closed.
Even though he understood the depths of racism and black oppression, Ali lived his life as a free man – a free loving and lovable man.
Did you know that in New Orleans they still have brown bag parties? What’s that, you ask? You and I go to a party, and when we get to the door, there’s a brown bag hanging down from the ceiling, and if our skin is darker than the brown bag, we can’t go in.
What I’ve come to learn in my long life is that ignorance is not bliss; it is time consuming and costly as hell.