At the age of 6, a teacher full of ambitions, who taught in the small public school of Biran, convinced my family that I should travel to Santiago de Cuba to accompany my older sister who would enter a highly prestigious convent school. Including me was a skill of that very teacher from the little school in Biran.

Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.

That summer after the draft was probably the most fun I’ve ever had, because all I had to do every day was wake up and go work out for four or five hours. I got to play some golf, which I love to do, too, and then got to hang out with my family.

Like all the best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters and of family disagreements.

It’s useful to go out of this world and see it from the perspective of another one.

Everybody is idealistic when you’re a kid.

Learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.

You know, my sister sings, my brother plays drums in my band. My whole family is a bunch of musicians.

Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones.

There weren’t a lot of career opportunities in crazy-fast hardcore punk, so you didn’t have a lot of ambition, just the love and passion to play music with your friends.

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

My mother told me two things constantly. One was to be a lady and the other was to be independent, and the law was something most unusual for those times because for most girls growing up in the ’40s, the most important degree was not your B.A. but your M.R.S.

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

For me, it’s about the way I carry myself and the way I treat other people. My relationship and how I feel about God and what He does for me, is something deeply personal. It’s where I came from, my family, I was brought up in a religious household and that’s very important to me.

If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.

Real education enhances the dignity of a human being and increases his or her self-respect. If only the real sense of education could be realized by each individual and carried forward in every field of human activity, the world will be so much a better place to live in.

My grandmother used to embarrass me more, when she would pick me up from school wearing a big fuzzy hat. I didn’t like that.

My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

I just really want to get music out and tour and go places I’ve never been, and just do more videos. I love photography and videography, and so I really want to direct videos when I can.

Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.

I imagine I will be less involved in film and be focused more on family and foreign affairs.

We can’t afford not to educate girls and give women the power and the access that they need.

The Bible says that Christians are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. On the job, in the grocery store, even among unsaved friends and family members, God’s people are there to bring seasoning to an unsavory situation.

What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the soul.

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!

My mother never gave up one me. I messed up in school so much they were sending me home, but my mother sent me right back.

I always wanted more – more of everything.

I hated to be treated as a child. I thought it was the worst situation.

The good opinion of mankind, like the lever of Archimedes, with the given fulcrum, moves the world.

When you’re traveling constantly, every day you become inspired, and it shows in my work, sonically, lyrically, visually. Conversations with women with different accents and stories told in those accents. I like to create characters based on different people I’ve met, and relationships. I like to tell stories loosely based on real-life events.

There’s nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

As I got older, my pops tried to keep me involved with the culture by telling me the stories of the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea, how he came to America, and about our family back home, because all that side of my family – my aunties, grandparents – is in Africa.

I’ve been in the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus since I was 8.

The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it.

I was bullied as a boy – lots of kids are, but hopefully most of us get on with our lives and grow up.

When I was 18, I went to the Soviet Union. I kept hearing that America was planning to bomb them – lots of bombs were going to come down on these people. I went there not knowing anything, except that I thought the whole thing was stupid and that I wanted to see who these people were that we were going to bomb.

I’m not afraid to look like a big, hairy, smelly, foreign devil in Tokyo, though I do my best not to, I really do.

Nothing is so strongly fortified that it cannot be taken by money.

I’ve got incredible support from my wife and family and people around me. I’ve got great people around me who handle anything on the outside, business-wise, who help free me up to create in my job.

I delayed my father’s funeral because of cricket.

Everybody, to some extent, manipulates. Even children learn to cry when they want something. There are all kinds of subtle things we do to get others to follow our lead, not bother us, and so on.

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

God’s dream is that you and I and all of us will realize that we are family, that we are made for togetherness, for goodness, and for compassion.

My family was a poor farming family, and we lived under absolute segregation.

My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families – second families, perhaps I should say.

I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.

Kids will remind you that, even though you’ve gone down a road 100 times, it’s brand new for them – and that’s healthy.

I was brought up differently than the average American child because the average child is brought up expecting to be happy.

When I was growing up, my family was so poor we couldn’t afford to pay attention.

I’m all self-taught. I never had a teacher. Even for English, and French, and German, I hardly went to school.

After two years at UCLA, I decided to leave. I was convinced that no amount of education would help a black man get a job.

If we go on your iPhone and go to the dictionary and look up ‚humble,‘ 80 per cent of the definition is negative. It’s a controlling word. It’s a way to control the masses and to control the sheep.

I want parents to teach that academic intelligence is essential, but so is financial intelligence.

I always tell people that if I move anywhere it would be Toronto.

It was because the chimps are so eye-catching, so like us and teach us so much that my work was recognised worldwide.

They know enough who know how to learn.

If someone is going down the wrong road, he doesn’t need motivation to speed him up. What he needs is education to turn him around.

The bulk of the universities are about teaching kids.

My parents taught me service – not by saying, but by doing. That was my culture, the culture of my family.

I never could get over the fact that The Pixies formed, worked and separated without America taking them to its heart or even recognizing their existence for the most part.