Anytime I look at a president, I don't care what color he is.

The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak - that gives it an existential emphasis.

There is no organizations and institutions that are worthwhile in terms of fighting for and dying for unless there is some individual integrity and character and virtue that is at work within various individuals in those institutions especially their leaders.

The love of wisdom is a way of life; that is to say, it's a set of practices that have to do with mustering the courage to think critically about ourselves, society, and the world; mustering the courage to empathize; the courage, I would say, to love; the courage to have compassion with others, especially the widow and the orphan, the fatherless and the motherless, poor and working peoples, gays and lesbians, and so forth - and the courage to hope.

Music at its best...is the grand archeology into and transfiguration of our guttural cry, the great human effort to grasp in time our deepest passions and yearnings as prisoners of time. Profound music leads us--beyond language--to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence.

I am not optimistic, but I've never been optimistic about humankind or America. The evidence never looks good in terms of forces for good actually becoming prominent.

So more and more black folk tend to be well-adjusted to [Barack] Obama's presidency, but does that mean they're well-adjusted to injustice? Because we don't hear our president talking about the new Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex.