I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a black family it says they're looting, if you see a white family it says they're looking for food.

If you see a black family, it's looting, but if it's a white family they are looking for food.

Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.

There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

Realists do not fear the results of their study.

The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.

Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it.

Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.

Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death.

If there is no God, everything is permitted.

A real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion. Money must be so far beneath a gentleman that it is hardly worth troubling about.

Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up. Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!

To live without Hope is to Cease to live.

When I was six, my best friend's parents bought him a piano. My mother noticed that every time I would go to his house, the first thing I would say to him was 'Levester' - His name was Levester - I said, 'Levester, can I go play your piano?' So, on my 7th birthday, my parents bought me a piano.

One thing that sticks in my mind is that jazz means freedom and openness. It's a music that, although it developed out of the African American experience, speaks more about the human experience than the experience of a particular people.

It's part of life to have obstacles. It's about overcoming obstacles; that's the key to happiness.

It's not the style that motivates me, as much as an attitude of openness that I have when I go into a project.

I'm always interested in looking forward toward the future. Carving out new ways of looking at things.

I think risk-taking is a great adventure. And life should be full of adventures.

It's easy to get sidetracked with technology, and that is the danger, but ultimately you have to see what works with the music and what doesn't. In a lot of cases, less is more. In most cases, less is more.

The thing that we possess, that machines don't, is the ability to exhibit wisdom.

Without wisdom, the future has no meaning, no valuable purpose.

You can practice to attain knowledge, but you can't practice to attain wisdom.

Back in the day for me was a great time in my life - I was in my 20s. Most people refer to their experiences in their twenties as being a highlight in their life. It's a period of time where you often develop your own way, your own sound, your own identity, and that happened with me, when I was with a great teacher - Miles Davis.

At a certain point, I became a kind of musician that has tunnel vision about jazz. I only listened to jazz and classical music.

Music happens to be an art form that transcends language.

Jazz has borrowed from other genres of music and also has lent itself to other genres of music.

World peace is no longer some pie-in-the-sky thing, because no single person or country is going to solve it on their own.

As a human being, I'm concerned about the world that I live in. So, I'm concerned about peace. I'm concerned about - about man's inhumanity to man. I'm concerned about the environment.

But I have to be careful not to let the world dazzle me so much that I forget that I'm a husband and a father.

If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.

Today's Constitution is a realistic document of freedom only because of several corrective amendments. Those amendments speak to a sense of decency and fairness that I and other Blacks cherish.

This is a great country, but fortunately for you, it is not perfect. There is much to be done to bring about complete equality. Remove hunger. Bring reality closer to theory and democratic principles.

We deal here with the right of all of our children, whatever their race, to an equal start in life and to an equal opportunity to reach their full potential as citizens. Those children who have been denied that right in the past deserve better than to see fences thrown up to deny them that right in the future.

I never worked hard until I got to the Howard Law School and met Charlie Houston... I saw this man's dedication, his vision, his willingness to sacrifice, and I told myself, 'You either shape up or ship out.' When you are being challenged by a great human being, you know that you can't ship out.

Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.

Sometimes history takes things into its own hands.

None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody - a parent, a teacher, an Ivy League crony or a few nuns - bent down and helped us pick up our boots.

When from our better selves we have too long been parted by the hurrying world, and droop. Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, how gracious, how benign is solitude.

In modern business it is not the crook who is to be feared most, it is the honest man who doesn't know what he is doing.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

The human mind is capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this.

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

How does the Meadow flower its bloom unfold? Because the lovely little flower is free down to its root, and in that freedom bold.

To begin, begin.

What is pride? A rocket that emulates the stars.

For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity.

Life is divided into three terms - that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present, to live better in the future.