Just being a Negro doesn't qualify you to understand the race situation any more than being sick makes you an expert on medicine.

It was an unwritten law that black comics were not permitted to work white nightclubs. You could sing and you could dance, but you couldn't stand flat-footed and talk; that was a no-no.

...Humans were the only creatures in the world that ate their food cooked. You'd never find a Gorilla frying up some bananas for dinner or a lion charcoal-broiling a zebra steak. Cats don't often run to the oven with a mouse or bird they've captured, and a dog wouldn't naturally prepare its rabbit dinner in a stew.

We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry, because we didn't think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre.

In the South they don't mind how close I get, so long as I don't get too big. In the North they don't mind how big I get, so long as I don't get too close.

Don't have a high school diploma? You're in my Cabinet. Why? For 200 years, a lot of Cabinets have existed in our government. Powerful men. Well-educated. So let's try something totally new.

[A politician is] a person skilled in the art of compromise. Usually an elected official who has compromised to get nominated, compromised to get elected, and compromised repeatedly to stay in office.