from the slave ship to the citizenship we faced a lot of bullship

The further jazz moves away from the stark blue continuum and the collective realities of Afro-American and American life, the more it moves into academic concert-hall lifelessness, which can be replicated by any middle class showing off its music lessons.

I guess I was the most unbohemian of all bohemians. My bohemianism consisted of not wanting to get involved with the stupid stuff that I thought people wanted you to get involved with - ... namely America... Dwight Eisenhower, McCarthyism and all those great things.

A rich man told me recently that a liberal is a man who tells other people what to do with their money.

A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom.

Art is a weapon in the struggle of ideas, the class struggle.

In America, black is a country.