The reward for playing jazz is playing jazz.
Even if toxic people are right about what is “good,” they are wrong if the approach is not healthy.
I think all Americans should be hopeful, and try to be optimistic.
When growing up, I saw segregation. I saw racial discrimination. I saw those signs that said white men, colored men. White women, colored women. White waiting. And I didn’t like it.
You have to have the capacity and the ability to take what people did, and how they did it, and forgive them and move on.
I believe in nonviolence as a way of life, as a way of living.
Races don’t fall in love, genders don’t fall in love: Individuals fall in love. We all should be free to marry the person that we love.
In the past the great majority of minority voters, in Ohio and other places that means African American voters, cast a large percentage of their votes during the early voting process.
When I was a student, I studied philosophy and religion. I talked about being patient. Some people say I was too hopeful, too optimistic, but you have to be optimistic just in keeping with the philosophy of non-violence.
But you have to have hope. You have to be optimistic in order to continue to move forward.
Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse.
My parents told me in the very beginning as a young child when I raised the question about segregation and racial discrimination, they told me not to get in the way, not to get in trouble, not to make any noise.
Ornette Coleman is doing the only really new thing in jazz since the innovations in the mid-forties of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and those of Thelonious Monk.
My mother and father and many of my relatives had been sharecroppers.
I don’t have any extraordinary gifts. I’m just an average Joe who grew up very poor in rural Alabama.
To make it hard, to make it difficult almost impossible for people to cast a vote is not in keeping with the democratic process.
Stalin’s postwar goals were security for himself, his regime, his country, and his ideology, in precisely that order.
Revisionism is a healthy historiographical process, and no one, not even revisionists, should be exempt from it.
It is worth starting with visions, though, because they establish hopes and fears. History then determines which prevail.
If not us, then who? If not now, then when?
We cannot keep turning our backs on gay and lesbian Americans. I have fought too hard and too long against discrimination based on race and color not to stand up against discrimination based on sexual orientation.