African Americans

"What's unfortunate is that most people regard the great leapers as being only the short guys who could dunk," said the 7-1 1/16 Wilt Chamberlain. "My sargent [vertical leap] was higher than Michael Jordan's. When I went to Kansas, they had a 12-foot basket in the gym, because Dr. Phog Allen was advocating the 12-foot basket. I used to dunk on that basket. It was an effort, but I could do it."

"If you can see the handwriting on the wall … you're on the toilet."

"Redd Foxx had grown-up jokes. … You ain't never heard no Redd Foxx stand-up. Hell, you still watchin' Sanford & Son reruns."

"Foxx was really the king of comedy and timing. He had one of the fastest comedic minds on the planet."

"Music played a large role in the survival of the black people in America — that and a sense of humor that just couldn't be enslaved."

"We were poor. If I wasn't a boy, I wouldn't have had nothing to play with."

"My first wife, I'll never forget her — and I've tried."

"Love. Hygiene. That's the important thing. Hygiene. The toughest thing in the world: [you] have to turn to your mate one night and say: "You gotta wash your ass!" Shit. Knowing how difficult it is, I said it for you : You Gotta Wash Your Ass."

"My mom said 'you are either going to be in jail, or be killed'. So I decided to do something different because I didn't want to be in one of those positions, so I kind of focused on football and took off from there."

"I keep reverting (to Duke Ellington), he to me is the greatest ever and my favorite jazz philosopher, as such."

"Julian Adderley's nickname "Cannonball" was derived from "cannibal," which he was dubbed in high school because of his large appetite. But the alto player also had a voracious hunger for music, which showed in his inventive improvisations, especially on Miles Davis's watershed album Kind of Blue and Adderley's remarkable Blue Note release Somethin' Else."

"There's no future without the past and anybody who doesn't really understand where jazz has come from has no right to try to direct where it's going."

"A young tenor player was complaining to me that Coleman Hawkins made him nervous. Man, I told him Hawkins was supposed to make him nervous! Hawkins has been making other sax players nervous for forty years!"

"The bottom line is more tax money is going to be needed. Just how much will be the primary issue on the agenda when Congressional leaders meet with the President later today, Wednesday, May the 9th, 1990. And good morning, welcome to Today. It’s a Wednesday morning, a day when the budget picture, frankly, seems gloomier than ever. It now seems the time has come to pay the fiddler for our costly dance of the Reagan years."

"White people love Wayne Brady, because he makes Bryant Gumbel look like Malcolm X."

"[David] Stern's version of what has been going on behind closed doors has of course been disputed, but his efforts were typical of a commissioner who has always seemed eager to be viewed as some kind of modern plantation overseer, treating NBA men as if they were his boys. It's part of Stern's M.O., like his past self-serving edicts on dress code and the questioning of officials. His moves were intended to do little more than show how he's the one keeping the hired hands in their place."

"And Kathleen Willey also spoke about Linda Tripp, a Clinton-basher who seems to be at every ugly turn in this controversy. Tripp was outside the Oval Office when Willey emerged from her encounter with the President. Just how is it that Linda Tripp is so often conveniently involved in the President’s troubles? For some clues let’s bring in The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, who has profiled the controversial Miss Tripp in this week’s issue. You write that co-workers often viewed her as an inveterate busybody. Has she always been a snoop and a gossip with a particular interest in other people’s romantic lives?"

"Scott, as you and I both know, a popular move these days is to make a titillating charge and then have the media create the frenzy. Given Kenneth Starr’s track record, should we suspect that he’s trying to do with innuendo that which he has been unable to do with evidence?"

"In the first two years this is a man [Clinton] who tried his best to balance the budget, to reform health care, to fight for gay rights, to support personal freedoms. Couldn’t those be considered doing the right things, evidence of true character?"

"This comes at a time when Republicans are looking to gut the Clean Water Act and also the Safe Drinking Water Act. What are our options? Are we now forced to boil water because bottled water is not an economically feasible option for a lot of people?"

"We've got an awful lot to talk about this week, including the sexual harassment suit against the President. Of course, in that one, it’s a little tough to figure out who’s really being harassed."

"If I’m a young black man in South Central L.A., where poverty is rampant and unemployment is skyrocketing, I see that Washington’s promises of a year ago have gone unfulfilled, I see that perhaps for a second time, the court’s inability to mete out justice in a blind fashion, why shouldn’t I vent my anger?"

"We keep looking for some good to come out of this. Maybe it might help in putting race relations back on the front burner after they’ve been subjugated so long as a result of the Reagan years."

"Largely as a result of the policies and priorities of the Reagan administration, more people are becoming poor and staying poor in this country than at any time since World War II."

"You must try to generate happiness within yourself. If you aren't happy in one place, chances are you won't be happy anyplace."

"He never complained about his team's bad luck or bad talent, never stopped playing the game for joy, never stopped giving his all, never lost his proud demeanor, and never acted like anything but a winner. He was a symbol of the Cubs' fans undiminishing resilience. If he could be happy to come to the park each afternoon, then so could we."

"His wrists are the secret of (Ernie) Banks' success. Instead of taking the big Ruthian type swing of the lively ball era, he swings his bat as if it were a buggy whip, striking at the ball with the reflexive swiftness of a serpent's tongue."

"There's another case — Ernie Banks. What could he do other than hit home runs? He didn't hit .300 lifetime. He couldn't play shortstop. He didn't have an arm. He couldn't run."

"Baseball reveals character; golf exposes it"

"It's a great day for a ball game; let's play two!"

"Sandy Koufax. Sandy was a special problem for me because he possessed exceptional control, speed and a great curve ball. He was highly disciplined, extremely committed and a very private person. These qualities enabled him to concentrate on his profession without a lot of unnecessary distractions."

"The only way to prove that you're a good sport is to lose."

"Did you hear that? I didn't hear anything. Put that question another way."

"I like my players to be married and in debt. That's the way you motivate them."

"The riches of the game are in the thrills, not the money."

"A woman who is willing to be herself and pursue her own potential runs not so much the risk of loneliness as the challenge of exposure to more interesting men — and people in general."

""We the people-still an excellent phrase," said the playwright Lorraine Hansberry in 1962, well aware who had been excluded, yet believing the phrase might someday come to embrace us all…Lorraine Hansberry spoke her words about government during the Cuban missile crisis, at a public meeting in New York to abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee. She also said in that speech, "My government is wrong." She did not say, I abhor all government. She claimed her government as a citizen, African American, and female, and she challenged it."

"The position of women has been debated in socialist and communist circles, but even there it is usually left as a question. And black women specifically? They have never been a primary subject of the American Left, always falling somewhere in the cracks between the Negro Question and the Woman Question. As we've seen, key interventions by the likes of Ida B. Wells or Claudia Jones attempted to disrupt color- and class-struggle-as-usual, but few leftists paid attention. Nearly half a century ago, black playwright and critic Lorraine Hansberry took the Communists to task for failing to recognize that the Woman Question stood alongside class, race, colonialism, and the struggle for peace as "the greatest social question existent.""

"My first real job was as an art editor of the People's Voice...The secretary who was there gently growing her wings was Lorraine Hansberry."

"Years later when Alpheus Hunton, Lou Burnham and Lorraine Hansberry started Freedom, the newspaper in which Paul Robeson wrote, they portrayed Africa-a big black giant, in shackles, ready to break loose. I realized then that there was a large segment of Black America caught up in the African movement, in African history."

"The great victims in this country of the institution called segregation, which is not solely a southern custom but has been for a hundred years a national way of life-the great victims are the white people, and the white man's children. Lorraine Hansberry said this afternoon when we were talking about the problem of being a Negro male in this society. Lorraine said that she wasn't too concerned really about Negro manhood since they had managed to endure and to even transcend fantastic things, but she was very worried about a civilization which could produce those 5 policemen standing on the Negro woman's neck in Birmingham or wherever it was, and I am too."

"It is hard for me to talk about Lorraine in a way because I loved her. She was like my baby sister, in a way. I can't think of her without a certain amount of pain. Every artist, every writer goes under the hammer. But under ordinary circumstances, since a writer's real ambition is to be anonymous and since his work is done in private, one arrives at some way of living with the hammer. But the black writer is by definition public, and he lives under something much worse. The pressure of being a writer is one thing, but the pressure of being a public figure is another and they are antithetical, too. The strain can kill you. It is certainly one of the things that killed Lorraine, who was very vivid, very young, very curious, very courageous, very honest. But she died, as you know, subsequent to the eruption in Birmingham, as the country, in fact, began to go over the cliff. Many of us began to realize then that there was no way of redeeming the American Republic. It was bent on destruction. This was one of the things that killed her. It was the incomprehension of her country and the disaster overtaking the nation, which, after all, she, like I, had many reasons to love. We were born there, and our ancestors paid a great deal for it."

"Eventually it comes to you: the thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely."

"I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful and that which is love. Therefore, since I have known all of these things, I have found them to be reason enough and — I wish to live. Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations."

"There is always something left to love. And if you ain't learned that, you ain't learned nothing. Have you cried for that boy today? I don't mean for yourself and for the family 'cause we lost the money. I mean for him; what he's been through and what it done to him. Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most; when they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain't through learning — because that ain't the time at all. It's when he's at his lowest and can't believe in hisself 'cause the world done whipped him so. When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is."

"Don't get up. Just sit a while and think. Never be afraid to sit a while and think."

"Children see things very well sometimes — and idealists even better."

"I look at you and I see the final triumph of stupidity in the world!"

"I can't begin to explain the influence his mind and ear has had on my band, myself, and the careers of so many other artists. The most humble, modest, worthy and gifted beatmaker I've known...and definitely the best producer on a mic. ~ Black Thought, MC from The Roots"

""That’s how me and Dilla always worked, we had a crazy chemistry. We would just sit there cracking jokes, you know, smoking, he got the headphones on. He’d come up with a beat in like 10 minutes, take the headphones off, the beat’s banging through the speakers. Load it up, make sure the mic’s on, show me where to press play, where to stop at, he’d press record and go upstairs, I’d lay the verse, he’d come back down like done and done. Load the next one up, he’d talk on the phone, I’d lay another song. That’s just how we worked." ~ Phat Kat (on recording the Dedication to the Suckers EP in one night)"