I'm a bluesman, which means that I put an emphasis on the minor keys.

It's fashionable to be indifferent to other people's suffering

Be willing to learn, because none of us know the truth

If Martin Luther King looked at the Obama administration and saw an intimate connection with Wall Street, he'd be very critical. If he saw drones being dropped on innocent people, he'd be very critical. If he saw rights and liberties violated by secret policies of the government, of the kind we've seen by the National Security Agency, he'd be very critical.

I like to be multi-contextual, which is much more important than being multicultural.

I'm not romanticizing black people, because we've got gangsters like everybody else.

I'm not a pacifist at all; I think there is a notion of "just war" that can be persuasively argued. I think in the face of Nazis, in the face of apartheid, that I would have joined those armies. But that's the last, last resort.