I had gone to Europe . . . to reach for a place as a serious artist, but I never doubted that I must return. I was - and am - an American.

If you have a purpose in which you can believe, there's no end to the amount of things you can accomplish.

You lose a lot of time, hating people.

When I sing, I don't want them to see that my face is black; I don't want them to see that my face is white - I want them to see my soul. And that is colorless.

As long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you otherwise might.

Prejudice: Sometimes it's like a hair across your cheek. You can't see it, you can't find it with your fingers, but you keep brushing at it because the feel of it is irritating.

Every one has a gift for something, even if it is the gift of being a good friend.

Fear is a disease that eats away at logic and makes man inhuman.

None of us is responsible for the complexion of his skin. This fact of nature offers no clue to the character or quality of the person underneath.

When you stop having dreams and ideals - well, you might as well stop altogether.

Leadership should be born out of the understanding of the needs of those who would be affected by it

Why love what you will lose?There is nothing else to love.

To me, money is absolutely irrelevant.

I worked 120 hours a week for eight years. That's 20 to 22 hours a day every day and one week I only got 15 hours sleep.

We gave you an atomic bomb, what do you want, mermaids ?

That was the best ice-cream soda I ever tasted.

Life, without the dignity of an intelligent being, is not worth having.

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Genius seems to consist merely in trueness of sight, in using such words as show that the man was an eye-witness, and not a repeater of what was told.

I like challenge. I like to be put into a situation which I haven't done before. Something new presents itself and I see if I can somehow finagle it into making a work of art out of it.

Pride is founded not on the sense of happiness, but on the sense of power.