You can meet a young person who goes to school and is really enthusiastic, but if a sufficiently strong personality convinces them that this is a waste of time, that person might flunk out.

When you're artistic director of a program, you present the music you want to present.

What we need in America is a renaissance. We need to go forward by going backward.

I don't know any women who don't think about what they look like, and I don't know any men who don't think about what women look like.

People don't really think other people are the same.

The extent of his influence across jazz, across American music, and around the world has such continuing stature that he is one of the few who can easily be mentioned with Stravinsky, Picasso and Joyce. His life was the embodiment of one who moves from rags to riches, from anonymity to internationally imitated innovator. Louis Daniel Armstrong supplied revolutionary language that took on such pervasiveness that it became commonplace, like the light bulb, the airplane, the telephone.

You'd never know that listening to people in the UN but tribalism is the father of racism.