A system that warehouses people is not the cure for social ills

The artist's role is to raise the consciousness of the people. To make them understand life, the world and themselves more completely. That's how I see it. Otherwise, I don't know why you do it.

A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom.

There is no justice in America, but it is the fight for justice that sustains you

The torture of being the unseen object, and the constantly observed subject.

My responsibility is to truth and beauty.

In America, black is a country.

I'd say I'm a revolutionary optimist. I believe that the good guys -the people- are going to win.

There is no depth to education without art.

Thought is more important than art....To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is.

All thinking people oppose terrorism both domestic & international but one should not be used to cover the other

If you think you've seen it all, put on your sunglasses, because you're about to be surprised.

We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow

I very rarely read any fiction. I love biographies; I read about all kinds of people. I love theology and some philosophy.

My aim was not to fool. My aim was to provoke thought and stir emotion.

The institutional scene in which American man has developed has lacked that accumulation from intervening stages which has been so dominant a feature of the European landscape.

All my life I've taken photographs of people who are completely at peace being what they were in the situations I photographed them in.

The biggest mistake I ever made was snorting cocaine. The second biggest mistake was I didn't realize that show business was two words.

It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we all take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is in fact a family resemblance.

When you sing the same song over and over and over again, it stops meaning what it originally meant to you. It starts sounding like white noise, or my washing machine.

The new is threatening to those who have mastered the old.