E. A. Davis Quotes

The road to success and the road to failure are almost exactly the same.

I'm no longer accepting the things I cannot change...I'm changing the things I cannot accept.

Anybody can play. The note is only 20 percent. The attitude of the motherfucker who plays it is 80 percent.

You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.

We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia.

When children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison.

Walls turned sideways are bridges.

Justice is indivisible. You can't decide who gets civil rights and who doesn't.

We must always attempt to lift as we climb

The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?

We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.

I have a hard time accepting diversity as a synonym for justice. Diversity is a corporate strategy.

Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionarys life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime.

Perfecting the past blurs your focus of the future.

It's not the note you play that's the wrong note - it's the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.

The process of empowerment cannot be simplistically defined in accordance with our own particular class interests. We must learn to lift as we climb.

We are never assured of justice without a fight.

It's better to be hated for who you are, than to be loved for someone you're not. It's a sign of your worth sometimes, if you're hated by the right people.

If somebody told me I only had an hour to live, I'd spend it choking a white man. I'd do it nice and slow.

It's not about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.

It is important not only to have the awareness and to feel impelled to become involved, it's important that there be a forum out there to which one can relate, an organization- a movement.

In music, silence is more important than sound.

You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good . . . Joan Crawford is dead. Good.

I'm always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning... Every day I find something creative to do with my life.

Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery

Do not fear mistakes. There are none.

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

There comes a time in every woman's life when the only thing that helps is a glass of champagne.

If you sacrifice your art because of some woman, or some man, or for some color, or for some wealth, you can't be trusted.

A painting is music you can see and music is a painting you can hear.

What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.

Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.

Getting old is not for sissies.

Some young Hollywood starlets remind me of my grandmother's old farmhouse -- all painted up nice on the front side, a big swing on the backside, and nothing whatsoever in the attic.

If you're not nervous then you're not paying attention.

We don't play to be seen. I'm addicted to music, not audiences.

African slavery, as it exists in the United States, is a moral, a social, and a political blessing.

You will never be happier than you expect. To change your happiness, change your expectation.

If everyone likes you, you're not doing it right.

If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you in the night.

You have to know 400 notes that you can play, then pick the right four.

A sure way to lose happiness, I found, is to want it at the expense of everything else.

The principle for which we contend is bound to reassert itself, though it may be at another time and in another form.

If you've never been hated by your child, you've never been a parent.

My passions were all gathered together like fingers that made a fist. Drive is considered aggression today; I knew it then as purpose.

Truthfulness is a cornerstone in character, and if it be not firmly laid in youth, there will ever after be a weak spot in the foundation.

Football is just a game. What matters is what you play for.

The key to life is accepting challenges. Once someone stops doing this, he's dead.

Truth crushed to earth is truth still and like a seed will rise again.