Bing Crosby said that Armstrong is "the beginning and the end of music in America," and he wasn't far wrong.

Jazz is for joy. It's for euphoria, it's for emotion, and anguish, and excitement, and all of the joys that great art can produce, and if it loses that, then it's lost everything.

You've got to have a gimmick if your band sucks.

I hate the idea of turning jazz into homework assignments. I would never have a quiz saying, "Who's the clarinetist on the Hot Five?" I don't care. If you like the clarinetist, you'll know who it is.

People should not feel intimidated by received wisdom. You have to discover it yourself. If I tell you that Armstrong is great, it's meaningless; you have to hear it.

Humility is a very important trait in a critic.

If you're genuinely candid and expressive then you're never wrong, even when you are wrong.

We can pay our debt to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.

Hence, within the space of two generations there has been a complete revolution in the attitude of the trades-unions toward the women working in their trades.

I am a party! Everywhere I go is a party!

I have a lifelong devotion to public service.

When you write, you're supposed to go stand somewhere else for a while, see things from a perspective that's not in line with your own reflexive truths.

My love of the British is equal to that of my own people.

Without centuries of Christian antisemitism, Hitlers passionate hatred would never have been so fervently echoed.

No one who was not by nature a lover of logic, and an extreme precisian in the use of words and phrases, could have written the two "Alice" books.

There is not a person alive who is not capable of greatly contributing to the well - being of this planet. Just changing your attitude can affect the world around you.

The way
 that people dress makes them part of an army, dressed in their own uniform,
 determined to do something