Nobody has ever convinced me that race is real.

Apple has given me a platform to spread music. They’re giving us Latinos a chance to shine.

I certainly respect the belief of the Hobby Lobby owners. On the other hand, they have no constitutional right to foist that belief on the hundreds and hundreds of women who work for them who don’t share that belief.

You gotta understand: I believe a woman should praise the man, the king. If you holding it down for your woman, I feel like the woman should praise. And the man should praise the queen.

Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They’re keeping up with their friends and family, but they’re also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They’re connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It’s almost a disadvantage if you’re not on it now.

People look at the same passage, and one person will say this is the best thing he’s ever read, and another person will say it’s absolutely idiotic. I mean, there’s no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.

I feel that there are a few things in the world without cultural barriers.

We need to try to unite audiences, unite countries, join musical tastes, unite people.

We continue to recognize the greater ability of some to earn more than others. But we do assert that the ambition of the individual to obtain for him a proper security is an ambition to be preferred to the appetite for great wealth and great power.

A black person grows up in this country – and in many places – knowing that racism will be as familiar as salt to the tongue. Also, it can be as dangerous as too much salt. I think that you must struggle for betterment for yourself and for everyone.

Like so many American families, our families weren’t asking for much. They didn’t begrudge anyone else’s success or care that others had much more than they did… in fact, they admired it.

I’m not denyin‘ the women are foolish. God Almighty made ‚em to match the men.

We have a tendency to condemn people who are different from us, to define their sins as paramount and our own sinfulness as being insignificant.

The only person who ever called me Paul was my father, so I always associate it with doing something wrong, you know. So, you know, occasionally, people will come up to me on the street and try to, you know, ingratiate themselves and call me Paul. I don’t like it, actually.

When you hear people making hateful comments, stand up to them. Point out what a waste it is to hate, and you could open their eyes.

There isn’t anybody that looks like me without clothes on.

I’ve never been an intellectual but I have this look.

How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being.

And every human being is precious.

I speak to the black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition.

If you change and adapt your persona, you are seen as inauthentic; if you stay the angry young man, you fade from attention or seem tiresome.

All these walls that keep us from loving each other as one family or one race – racism, religion, where we grew up, whatever, class, socioeconomic – what makes us be so selfish and prideful, what keeps us from wanting to help the next man, what makes us be so focused on a personal legacy as opposed to the entire legacy of a race.

National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right.

You can use your real identity, or you can use phone numbers for something like WhatsApp, and pseudonyms for something like Instagram. But in any of those you’re not just sharing and consuming content, you are also building relationships with people and building an understanding of people.

The revolution is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters.

If segregationists had their way, I would not be a member of the United States Senate today, I would not be a top contender to be president of the United States.

I’m not concerned with people seeing me in a certain way. Some people see me as a kid, some people see me as an adult. But I’m seriously not going to complain how anybody sees me, as long as they see me.

Some of the most moving experiences I’ve had are just in black churches in the South, during the Civil Rights Movement, where people were getting beaten, killed, really struggling for the most elementary rights.

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn’t be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

I love making new friends and I respect people for a lot of different reasons.

Honestly, I like everything, boyish girls, girlish boys, the heavy and the skinny.

I’m not looking to exclude people, I’m looking to include them.

What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

You can’t have it all, all at once. Who – man or woman – has it all, all at once? Over my lifespan, I think I have had it all. But in different periods of time, things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.

God tells us not to judge one another, no matter what anyone’s sexual preferences are or if they’re black, brown or purple.

The work is the work. The work is not me.

Food is everything we are. It’s an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It’s inseparable from those from the get-go.

It was the nation and the race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion’s heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.

I do have a lot of gays in my family now, but some will never come out.

If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.

Everywhere I go, the kids call me ‚the book lady.‘ The older I get, the more appreciative I seem to be of the ‚book lady‘ title. It makes me feel more like a legitimate person, not just a singer or an entertainer. But it makes me feel like I’ve done something good with my life and with my success.

When you truly accept that those children in some far off place in the global village have the same value as you in God’s eyes or even in just your eyes, then your life is forever changed; you see something that you can’t un-see.

I guess it’s flattering that everyone believed I was those characters, but it also is dehumanizing.

Building capacity dissolves differences. It irons out inequalities.

There are so many men and women who hold no distinctive positions but whose contribution towards the development of society has been enormous.

The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it – aliens.

I don’t look at myself as a commodity, but I’m sure a lot of people have.

We make the future sustainable when we invest in the poor, not when we insist on their suffering.

I think the bottom of the totem pole is African-American women, or women of colour. I think they get the least opportunities in Hollywood.

I don’t just listen to rap.

There is not a liberal America and a conservative America – there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and latino America and asian America – there’s the United States of America.

I think tolerance and acceptance and love is something that feeds every community.

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

Today, Negroes play on every big league club and in every minor league. With millions of other Negroes in other walks of life, we are willing to stand up and be counted for what we believe in. In baseball or out, we are no longer willing to wait until Judgment Day for equality – we want it here on earth as well as in Heaven.

You know, when you don’t go on TV and talk about how many women you sleep with, some people in Hollywood, that are supposedly ‚in the know,‘ start whispering that you’re gay. If I were gay, I wouldn’t be ashamed to admit it, but I’m not.

I think that there’s no doubt that as I see friends, families, children of gay couples who are thriving, you know, that has an impact on how I think about these issues.

Germany is a great nation only because its people have so much Polish blood in their veins.

If I write badly about blacks, homosexuals and women, it is because of these who I met were that. There are many ‚bads‘ – bad dogs, bad censorship; there are even ‚bad‘ white males. Only, when you write about ‚bad‘ white males, they don’t complain about it. And need I say that there are ‚good‘ blacks, ‚good‘ homosexuals and ‚good‘ women?

I’m not focused on the gay and lesbian movement.

It’s like, remember who you always were, where you came from, who your parents were, how they raised you. Because that authentic self is going to follow you all through life, so make sure that it’s solid so it’s something that you can hold on and be proud of for the rest of your life.

To deprive a man of his natural liberty and to deny to him the ordinary amenities of life is worse then starving the body; it is starvation of the soul, the dweller in the body.