The high point of civilization is that you can hate me and I can hate you but we develop an etiquette that allows us to deal with each other because if we acted solely upon our impulse we'd probably go to war.

If you're going to get in the ring and try to take the belt, you have to prepare to get hit.

The point is, you have an ethnic heritage and you have a human heritage. Your human heritage includes everything of human value.

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

Your ethnic or sexual identity, what region of the country you're from, what your class is - those aspects of your identity are not the same as your aesthetic identity.

But the myth of violent solutions as the ultimate solutions maintains itself in much of popular media.

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.