African Americans

"I'm not concerned with your liking or disliking me. All I ask is that you respect me as a human being. I am not ashamed of my dark skin. You and every other white American should understand that we believe our color is an asset. Your dislike of my aggressiveness has no effect on me. I'm after something much more important than your favor or disfavor. You should at least respect me as a man who stands up for what he believes in. I am not an . I am in this fight to stay."

"The role of the manager is overrated, anyhow. Look at Stengel. When he was with the Yankees, loaded with material, he was a winner. When he moved over to the Mets, he finished last. They voted Casey the greatest living manager. That's a lot of bull—a joke. The only thing a manager has to do is relate to the players. Who did Casey ever relate to? Nobody but himself."

"A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives."

"No other player on this club with the possible exception of Bruce Edwards has done more to put the Dodgers up in the race than Robinson has. He is everything Branch Rickey said he was when he came up from Montreal."

"I didn't know baseball from ping pong. But the point was that he had broken in. I grew inches that day. I puffed out my chest."

"In 1964 I was in Paris ... [in] a bar (I think it was the Blue Note) where there was a very drunk man sitting peacefully alone, when to my surprise someone led him (drink in hand) to the piano. I groaned at the thought of what was going to be inflicted on us. He took a large swig, and then played some of the most beautiful, fluent jazz I have ever heard. After half an hour he was helped back to his table where he slumped with his drink. It was Bud Powell."

"He was the foundation out of which stemmed the whole edifice of modern jazz piano; every jazz pianist since Bud either came through him or is deliberately attempting to get away from playing like him."

"All too often, the begetters of bebop confirmed F. Scott Fitzgerald's dictum that there are no second acts in American lives. Many, such as Charlie Parker, died young, burned out by the music’s drug-ridden lifestyle. But the fate of Bud Powell, who had as revolutionary an impact on the piano as Parker did on the saxophone, may be more poignant. A shy, reclusive personality, Powell's career was blighted by a police beating, periods in mental institutions, alcoholism and TB. During his last decade, his playing veered between flickers of brilliance and painful, fumbling approximation, until his death in 1966 aged 41. There wasn't a single jazz pianist who didn't bear the imprint of his fiery creativity. He set both the terms for the modern keyboard style and, in his heyday, an almost terrifying standard of performance. A Powell piano solo wasn't so much played as unleashed, its momentum combining dazzling imagination and uncanny technical lucidity. His up-tempo feats were astonishing, as his right hand sent lines spinning over the keyboard, with riffs and bursts of melody punctuated by his left. That non-stop linear virtuosity became the hallmark of bebop piano, but what made him unique was his variety of accent and nuance. This was no mechanical stream of quavers, but a torrent of ideas – accompanied by the pianist’s groans, as if reflecting the intensity of his inspiration."

"It was my first time away from home, my first experience in an all-black situation, and I found myself being punished for everything I'd ever been taught was right. I got all A's and was hated for it; I spoke correctly and was called a punk. I had to learn a new language simply to deal with the threats. I had good manners, and was a good little boy and paid for it with my hide."

"I'm not comfortable being preachy, but more people have to start spending as much time in the library as they do on the basketball court. If they took to the idea that they could escape poverty through education, I think it would make a more basic and long-lasting change in the way things happen. When we set up unrealistic goals and then don't achieve them, that's another example of internalized defeat. What we need are positive, realistic ideas and the willingness to work. Hard work and practical goals."

"In Alan Moore’s brilliant graphic novel, Batman: The Killing Joke, the Joker justifies his psychopathic behavior by philosophizing that every human being is just "one bad day away" from rejecting the polite veneer of civilization's morality in the face of an indifferent universe. To him, we are all amoral sleeper agents awaiting the secret code word to awaken us to selfish violence. Yet, even if the universe is indifferent, most people are not."

"Though movies (Taxi Driver for John Hinckley Jr., would-be assassin of Ronald Reagan), books (The Catcher in the Rye for Mark David Chapman, John Lennon's murderer) and songs ("Helter Skelter" for Tate-LaBianca murders mastermind Charles Manson) may articulate specific criminals acts, they don’t inspire the person's desire for violence. Science has proven that in numerous studies. It's tempting to blame movies, video games and rap music because they often express humanity's worst impulses, but impulses are not actions for most of us. And for the mentally ill seeking violence, anything can set them off. Alek Minassian, the self-described incel (involuntary celibate) who deliberately drove his van into a crowd in Toronto in 2018, killing 10 people, said he was motivated by his resentment toward women for having sexually rejected him in favor of giving "their love and affection to obnoxious brutes." Should we then demand that studios producing romantic comedies and publishers of romance novels be shamed into contributing to anti-incel causes? The 2017 Las Vegas shooter killed 59 and injured 851 during a country music festival. Should country music bear some responsibility?"

"When Bruce closed the schools, he felt he was unburdening himself of having to prove through his students that his system had merit. He didn't want to get into that. He wanted them to evolve and teach, but It was not a thing where you have to teach what I taught. You have to teach what you learned and that's going to be more than what he taught, hopefully for those students that understood what he was doing."

"We have 7 billion people on this planet. It’s not that there’s not enough room on this planet for 7 billion people, it’s that the energy needs for 7 billion people are 7 billion people’s worth of energy needs, as opposed to, say, 2 billion. Imagine how much pollution would be in the air and the oceans if there were only 2 billion people putting it in? So yeah, we’re already overpopulated."

"I hate the word homophobia. It's not a phobia. You are not scared. You are an asshole."

"The search for truth is never over and the survival of truth is never assured. We have to choose - do we stand with those who wish to suppress the truth or stand with those who seek it."

"You're going to relegate my history to a month? I don't want a black history month. Black history is American history."

"I am going to stop calling you a white man and I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black man."

"To go somewhere and say: 'I have this really terrific movie, but I need some . . . money' - Good luck!"

"Learning how to be still, to really be still and let life happen - that stillness becomes a radiance."

"It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn’t wait to leave."

"An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular."

"The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait."

"A good book is never exhausted. It goes on whispering to you from the wall."

"I don't expect people who listen to Emerson, Lake, and Palmer to come hear me. I accept that reality."

"You practice so you can invent. Discipline? No. The joy of practicing leads you to the celebration of the creation."

"To feel is the most terrifying thing in this society."

"Even listeners who dispute Cecil Taylor’s jazz credentials wouldn’t deny his creative intensity. They’d just protest that his furious, free-form piano improvisations, pummelling the keyboard with fingers, fists and forearms, bearing no relation to metre or melody and often lasting well over an hour, belong to the European avant-garde, not African-American tradition. But Taylor himself has always disagreed. Though conservatory-trained and possessing a virtuoso technique, he regards jazz as black music, his way, he once said, ‘of holding on to Negro culture’. His fascination with the rhythmic and harmonic abstractions of Stravinsky and Bartók, Dave Brubeck and Lennie Tristano gave way to the potency of African-American pianists: Ellington, Monk, Horace Silver. Revelling in what he called ‘the physicality, the filth, the movement in the attack’, the young Taylor made it his own. He viewed the piano as percussive – ‘88 tuned drums’, his style an amalgam he dubbed ‘rhythm-sound-energy’. His ultimate inspiration was the very force of nature: ‘music is as close as I can become to a mountain, tree or river’. Though that kind of mysticism may seem a long way from blues and swing, Taylor’s work has its own intoxication."

"Sometimes when it goes really well, you wonder, "who's that at the piano?""

"If it doesn't fit, you must acquit."

"You could kill your wife and there's no such thing as 25 to life as long as you've got the cash to pay for Cochran."

"I loved him as a good Christian man; I look at Johnnie as a great Christian. I knew him as that. He was a great guy."

"She got more niggas off than Cochran."

"I work not only for the O.J.s, but also the No Js."

"Even then, though, I cared about people, not theories. I had no wish to spin individual cases into some grandiose, ideologically driven legal theory. I no longer believed in utopian solutions, or the cynical politicians who used them to sucker voters, claiming to care about the poor while actually exploiting them. Not only was I sure that such solutions were doomed to failure, but I also feared that once they failed, the resulting disillusionment would make matters even worse. Yet it was taken for granted in the seventies that the purveyors of these elaborate nostrums were doing the right thing, and anyone who dared to challenge their effectiveness was hooted down. That prospect intimidated me, especially when it came to racial matters."

"How often had he longed to hold us, hug us, grant our every wish, but held himself back for fear of letting us see his vulnerability, believing as he did that real love demanded not affection but discipline?"

"All I cared about was finding answers, no matter who had them. When, later on, I began to associate with conservatives, it was because their ideas were closer to mine than liberals' ideas, not because I saw myself as one of them. I'd already noticed that it was liberals, not conservatives, who were most likely to condescend to blacks, but I assumed, like the good radical I once was, that liberals and conservatives were simply two different breeds of snake, one stealthy, the other openly hostile."

"The popular political answers of the day, I saw, had hardened into dogma, making anyone who questioned them a heretic. Having turned my back on religion, I saw no reason to accept mere political opinions as gospel truth. Years later these same dogmatists would walk away from the wreckage of their failed policies, like children tossing aside a broken toy. But the victims they left behind were real people- my people."

"I often had occasion to remind myself in years to come that self-interest isn't a principle- it's just self-interest."

"The black people I knew came from different places and backgrounds- social, economic, even ethnic- yet the color of our skin was somehow supposed to make us identical in spite of our differences. I didn't buy it. Of course we had all experienced racism in one way or another, but did that mean that we had to think alike?"

"I began to suspect that Daddy had been right all along: the only hope I had of changing the world was to change myself first."

"Long after the fact, it occurred to me that this was a metaphor for life- blisters come before calluses, vulnerability before maturity- but not even the thickest of skins could have spared us the lash of Daddy's tongue."

"For a time we wondered why our real father didn't come and rescue us, but we had long since accepted our fate by the time we finally met him."

"Those incentives have made the legacy of this Courts public purpose test an unhappy one. In the 1950s, no doubt emboldened in part by the expansive understanding of public use this Court adopted in Berman, cities rushed to draw plans for downtown development. Of all the families displaced by urban renewal from 1949 through 1963, 63 percent of those whose race was known were nonwhite, and of these families, 56 percent of nonwhites and 38 percent of whites had incomes low enough to qualify for public housing, which, however, was seldom available to them. Public works projects in the 1950s and 1960s destroyed predominantly minority communities in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Baltimore, Maryland. In 1981, urban planners in Detroit, Michigan, uprooted the largely lower-income and elderly Poletown neighborhood for the benefit of the General Motors Corporation. Urban renewal projects have long been associated with the displacement of blacks; [i]n cities across the country, urban renewal came to be known as Negro removal. Over 97 percent of the individuals forcibly removed from their homes by the slum-clearance project upheld by this Court in Berman were black. Regrettably, the predictable consequence of the Court’s decision will be to exacerbate these effects."

"Something has gone seriously awry with this Court's interpretation of the Constitution."

"It's fascinating that people, there's so many people now who will make judgments based on what you look like. I'm black, so I'm supposed to think a certain way? I'm supposed to have certain opinions? I don't do that. You don't create a box and put people in and then make a lot of generalizations about them."

"A white person is free to think whatever they want to think, but a black person has to think a certain way. Why do you think I get in so much controversy? People have a model of what they think a black person should think."

"[My] approach recognizes the basic principle of a written Constitution. We "the people" adopted a written Constitution precisely because it has a fixed meaning, a meaning that does not change. Otherwise we would have adopted the British approach of an unwritten, evolving constitution. Aside from amendment according to Article V, the Constitution’s meaning cannot be updated, or changed, or altered by the Supreme Court, the Congress, or the President. Of course, even when strictly interpreted as I believe it should be, the Constitution remains a modern, "breathing" document as some like to call it, in the sense that the Court is constantly required to interpret how its provisions apply to the Constitutional questions of modern life. Nevertheless, strict interpretation must never surrender to the understandably attractive impulse towards creative but unwarranted alterations of first principles."

"I've come to assert that I am a judge and I will not be consigned the unquestioned opinions of others. But even more than that, I have come to say that isn't it time to move on? Isn't it time to realize that being angry with me solves no problems? Isn't it time to acknowledge that the problem of race has defied simple solutions and that not one of us, not a single one of us can lay claim to the solution? Isn't it time that we respect ourselves and each other as we have demanded respect from others? Isn't it time to ignore those whose sole occupation is sowing seeds of discord and animus? That is self-hatred. Isn't it time to continue diligently to search for lasting solutions? I believe that the time has come today. God bless each of you, and may God keep you."

"I have come here today not in anger or to anger, though my mere presence has been sufficient, obviously, to anger some. Nor have I come to defend my views, but rather to assert my right to think for myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I'm black. I come to state that I'm a man, free to think for myself and do as I please."