Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.

I am not competing with anyone other than myself. I want to be excellent at whatever I do.

I believe that the most important single thing, beyond discipline and creativity is daring to dare.

My people had used music to soothe slavery's torment or to propitiate God, or to describe the sweetness of love and the distress of lovelessness, but I knew no race could sing and dance its way to freedom.

My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.

The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast. Hence the janitor who lives in one room but sports a robin's-egg-blue Cadillac is not laughed at but admired, and the domestic who buys forty-dollar shoes is not criticized but is appreciated. We know that they have put to use their full mental and physical powers. Each single gain feeds into the gains of the body collective.

We need language to tell us who we are, how we feel, what we're capable of- to explain the pains and glory of our existence.