All Quotes

"Successful leaders must be highly visible, if for no other reason than to share the hardships of their men. I am thinking of General George Patton, who made a habit of always visiting the front lines in his jeep or tank. When he returned to his field headquarters, he normally altered his mode of transportation to an airplane to avoid having his men see him moving back."

"The Internet is a medium only at the bit level. At the human level, it is a conversation that, because of the persistence and linkedness of pages, has elements of a world. It could only be a medium if we absolutely didn't care about it."

"The cure to information overload is more information."

"To a collector of curios, the dust is metadata."

"Metadata liberates us, liberates knowledge."

"Our purpose is to educate as well as to entertain. Painless preaching is as good a term as any for what we do. If you're going to come away from a party singing the lyrics of a song, it is better that you sing of self-pride like 'We're a Winner' instead of 'Do the Boo-ga-loo!'"

"He don't love you like I love you If he did, he wouldn't break your heart He don't love you like I love you He's try-in' to tear us apart."

"People get ready there's a train comin'; You don't need no baggage, just get on board. All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin'; You don't need no ticket, just thank the lord."

"He says don't worry, worry, worry, worry.But they don't know, There can be no show. And if there's a hell below, We're all gonna go, go, go, go, go."

"Hush now child and don't you cry; Your folks might understand you by and by. Move on up towards your destination; You may find from time to time, Complications."

"We'll all turn black So who's to know? As a matter of fact, Color, creed and breed must go. There will be no light, So there can be no sight. And you'll judge your fellow man; Understand bout what is right. A million music, a million sound There's neutral thoughts For the underground."

"Let's do it in the mornin' Sweet breeze in the summer time. Feeling your sweet face All laid up next to mine. Sweet love in the midnight; Good sleep, come mornin' light. No worries 'bout nothin'; Just gettin' good, just gettin' good Just gettin' good love."

"Oh, many say that I'm too young To let you know just where I come from. Oh, but you will see that it's just a matter of time My love will surely make you mine.Ooh, living in a world of ghetto life, Everyone around seems so uptight. Nothing's wrong. It's alright with my man, my man."

"I'm giving him something he can feel. Oh, ho, to let him know my love is real.Hey, hey, hey...I'm giving him something he can feel. Yes, I am, babe To let you know my love is real."

"Wakin' up to find yourself creamin' Check your fears and hope that you're dreamin' A little space is all that I need If these suckers just allow me to breathe Snake pits and Lucifer's burns Can't take the strength I've earned and learned Stepped in depth of the same livin' hell Ain't too proud to die here as well.Do Do Wap is strong in here; Do Do Wap is strong in here, hey! hey!"

"I was someone more Because I was no one poor. To find that I too was down on my knees. I'm just homeless."

"Now is always the right time With something positive in your mind. Whenever someone pulls you down, Just get back up and hold your ground. ... Summer, winter, fall just go Through the rain and through the snow. Just get on back to living again...right on."

"It's hard to understand; There was love in this man. I'm sure all would agree That his misery Was his woman and things. Now Freddie's dead; That's what I said.Everybody's misused him; Ripped him off and abused him. Another junkie playin'; Pushin' dope for the man. A terrible blow, but that's how it go. Freddie's on the corner now. If you wanna be a junkie, wow; Remember, Freddie's dead."

"Why can't we brothers Protect one another? No one's serious, And it makes me furious. Don't be misled, Just think of Fred."

"Oooh, Superfly You're gonna make your fortune by and by. But if you lose, don't ask no questions why. The only game you know is Do or Die. Ah-ha-ha."

"Krieg ohne Haß"

"In general they are intoxicated by the fame of mass culture, a fame which the latter knows how to manipulate; they could just as well get together in clubs for worshipping film stars or for collecting autographs. What is important to them is the sense of belonging as such, identification, without paying particular attention to its content. As girls, they have trained themselves to faint upon hearing the voice of a 'crooner'. Their applause, cued in by a light-signal, is transmitted directly on the popular radio programmes they are permitted to attend. They call themselves 'jitter-bugs', bugs which carry out reflex movements, performers of their own ecstasy. Merely to be carried away by anything at all, to have something of their own, compensates for their impoverished and barren existence. The gesture of adolescence, which raves for this or that on one day with the ever-present possibility of damning it as idiocy on the next, is now socialized."

"What would we think of an observer who published a log in which he recorded: On the 12th I saw the moon, on the 13th the sun looked very nice, the following night you could see a lot of stars (et cetera)? ... Most of our writers are moral observers of precisely that caliber, and the expert is as appalled when he reads it as an expert astronomer would be to read such a log."

"In a public, as we may understand the term,"

"A mass culture is a culture which can be appropriated by the meanest capacities without any intellectual or moral effort whatsoever. ... Liberal education is the counterpoison to mass culture, to the corroding effects of mass culture, to its inherent tendency to produce nothing but “specialists without spirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart.""

"Jazz is the false liquidation of art—instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture."

"If you have to ask, you'll never know."

"Destructive or redemptive, degenerate or transformative? Jazz is a phenomenon, a true world music."

"Jazz, often called America's classical music, so influenced our culture that Americans named a decade after it. Like the country of its birth, jazz blends many traditions, such as African-American folk, rhythm and blues, French Creole classical form, and gospel. Through the creation and performance of music like jazz, black Americans were better able to exchange ideas freely across racial and cultural barriers."

"When people hear the word "jazzman," the first thing they think is unemployed, then dope and sex, but the young guys aren't like that anymore. I'd like a girl to be able to take me home and introduce me to her parents and hear them say, "Oh, a jazzman. Isn't that fine.""

"When they study our civilization two thousand years from now, there will only be three things that Americans will be known for: the Constitution, baseball and jazz music. They're the three most beautiful things Americans have ever created."

"By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with."

"Well, feel something in B-flat, motherfucker."

"There is a view that jazz is "evil" because it comes from evil people, but actually the greatest priests on 52nd Street and on the streets of New York City were the musicians. They were doing the greatest healing work. They knew how to punch through music that would cure and make people feel good."

"I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday. I take 242 choruses; my ideas vary and sometimes roll from chorus to chorus or from halfway through a chorus to halfway into the next."

"Jazz is something Negroes invented, and it said the most profound things—not only about us and the way we look at things, but about what modern democratic life is really about. It is the nobility of the race put into sound … jazz has all the elements, from the spare and penetrating to the complex and enveloping. It is the hardest music to play that I know of, and it is the highest rendition of individual emotion in the history of Western music."

"Jazz is not a "form" but a collection of tags and tricks."

"Music is a journey. Jazz is getting lost."

"[T]he Negroes invented [Jazz] to satisfy their primitive inclinations, as well as their desire to be noisy on the one hand and to excite bestial tendencies on the other."

"What makes the performance is the dialogue created between you and everybody around you spontaneously. And you have to interact with everybody up there, interacting and reacting, throwing out ideas. Jazz is a purely democratic music. It's collective creativity where somebody introduces something and we all get a chance to say something about it. It always amazes me, the whole of it is just a great spirit. It grabs you to the point where it never lets you go until the very last breath."

"Jazz has got to retain its integrity, its spirituality. It's got to mean something. That's No. 1. There are a lot of great players thinking that way in the music. It's all good. I don't think we should lament the fact that, Oh, we can't play in the clubs anymore. That's passing. We'll be able to, as musicians, play serious jazz. I think that will prevail. I can't prophesize, but I have a strong intuitive feeling that it will be stronger than ever and have another shot at trying to turn this world around."

"The basic principles of all jazz styles are the same. Good musical taste, technical skill, and a firm grasp of the principles of chord construction and chord progression make up the sum total."

"You can be a jazz player and be respected by musicians, but the rest of the world doesn’t care. [...] We’re going to play a game: name a jazz player that means something."

"You don't often see a musician that is able to play jazz."

"Even people who don’t know much about jazz are aware that jazz musicians are meant to be ‘characters’ – free-spirited types whose absorption in music generates bizarre behaviour."

"Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny."

"The attitude to sexual love in the 'pop' song is so ugly and mechanical as to seem schizoid, and psychopathological. Exposed as they are to such powerful cultural statements, young people are being encouraged to forfeit genuine commitment in love in favour of depersonalised sexual activity, with an undercurrent of violence, and to take false solutions in which they must deny their deepest needs, by hate."

"Pop music can't be described, but quantified."

"The attitude to sexual love in the "pop" song is so ugly and mechanical as to seem schizoid, and psychopathological. Exposed as they are to such powerful cultural statements, young people are being encouraged to forfeit genuine commitment in love in favour of depersonalised sexual activity, with an undercurrent of violence, and to take false solutions in which they must deny their deepest needs, by hate."

"... And this is the origin of pop music: it's a professional music which draws upon both folk music and fine arts music as well."