Through first-class education, a generation marches down the long uncertain road of the future with confidence.

For me as a person who's in the arts and as someone who understands the magnitude of our contributions and the price that was paid to contribute to that, that we just have not gotten that together. I will do all that I can to get in front of our kids, to try to teach them, but at a certain point the people have to want it and come towards it.

I dress up a certain way because I respect the music.

Who creates a thing is not as important as what the thing is. Who created baseball? Who created basketball? Who created the space program? Who created - we could go on and on. We could argue about who created something. We all are participants in it.

Even if nobody's singing, just when you talk, you're singing. I'll meet somebody and say, "Oh, I'm tone-deaf." I say, "You're not tone-deaf, because if you were tone-deaf you would speak like that. But you're 'Oh, I'm tone-deaf.' You already sang a song to me."

The first jazz musician was a trumpeter, Buddy Bolden, and the last will be a trumpeter, the archangel Gabriel.

My daddy expected that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He had lived in an America of continual social progress.