We've been talking about this for a good while, the immorality of drones, dropping bombs on innocent people. It's been over 200 children so far. These are war crimes.

Well technologically and so forth, it's a breakthrough, and yet [Birth of a Nation,] it's very white supremacist to the core in terms of the narrative content.

We live in a world where people are fearful of extremism, but Martin Luther King would say he was always trying to keep the flow of love in place. In that sense, he turned the world on its head.

For me, musicians are poets. Beethoven describes himself as a poet of tones, just like Coltrane's a poet of tempo.

Martin Luther King's legacy is never to be measured by bricks and mortar, but rather by the kind of lives that we live, and the kind of love and service that we render.

Collaborating with the musical genius of our time in some ways with Prince himself - late, great Gerald Levert,all these are forms of singing education, what the Greeks call paideia,that deep education to get us to shift from superficial things to serious things, to shift from bling-bling to life and death to justice and pain and joy, those fundamental, elemental things that we must come to terms with as we make our moves from our mother's womb to the tomb.

The problem is that in America is that the nation state has been so weak when it comes to the history of big markets the history of big business in a way so we have a very weak welfare state compared to European nation states.