Stanley Crouch Quotes

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.

If there's an intellectual highway, there's also an intellectual subway.

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

As you know from reading many of these Negro writers, we don't deal too much with the discussion of democracy and what it means and how improvisation fits in all that.

Rap actually comes out of punk rock, not black music.

When a violent minority that crosses color lines comes to believe that killing those you know or do not know is a reasonable solution to problems, we are in need of another vision.

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.

Our society has gotten to the point where we might soon become less and less shocked by any kind of violence.

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

All of us are made up of the stories that we listen to, the ones we disagree with and the ones that we agree with.

When people conclude that all is futile, then the absurd becomes the norm.

Our democratic richness arrives when we're able to comprehend our collective humanity accurately.

The discussion of ideas as opposed to the American narcissistic obsession with what's going on with the self, that's the general thing people are talking about.

Louis Armstrong, who learned to be in exquisite dress, came from the bottom, and he's not a trash can.

But there are a number of attitudes that should not be emotionally or psychologically ingested by young people.

Under popular culture's obsession with a naive inclusion, everything is O.K.

Unfortunately, I'm not a person that's always capable of living up to the Boy Scout philosophy.

The grand irony, however, is that Southern segregation was not brought to an end, nor redneck violence dramatically reduced, by violence.

In America, we have to learn to be patient enough to figure out what somebody is saying. Somebody might actually be saying something.

Everybody has to be reminded that there's another way to be. Another more mysterious, unpredictable way to be that's not necessarily based upon contrivances.

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.

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

Now the writing in the head, I definitely do every day, thinking about how I want to phrase something or how I'd like to rephrase something I've already written.

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

Getting to the pint where the other is not the enemy is a big leap.

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

You must be willing to accept the fact that pain is a part of the process of revelation.

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