I learned that if you bring black people together, you bring them together with a song. To this day, I don't understand how people think they can bring anybody together without a song.

Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are.

If you're in a coalition and you're comfortable, you know it's not a broad enough coalition.

I was at the Smithsonian for twenty years, and I'm still at the Smithsonian as a curator emeritus, and I still plan to figure out what that means for me at this point in my life

There is nowhere you can go and only be with people who are like you. Give it up.

If, in moving through your life, you find yourself lost, go back to the last place where you knew who you were, and what you were doing, and start from there.

If every moment is sacred and if you are amazed and in awe most of the time when you find yourself breathing and not crazy, then you are in a state of constant thankfulness, worship and humility.

If we dwell in a community that is comfortable, then it's probably not broad enough a coalition.

Mothering/nurturing is a vital force and process establishing relationships throughout the universe.

The voice I have now, I got the first time I sang in a movement meeting, after I got out of jail... and I'd never heard it before in my life.

When I started graduate school I was interested in the culture of the Civil Rights Movement.

We all fail at certain points in our lives, but if your journey stops at failure, it will become your destination.

It's your destiny to be here, Dana.""Oh really. How nice. Is it Brandon's destiny to be here too?""Yep.

Where is this great love for rock and roll that existed for 50 or 60 years?

The Church exists by mission, just as a fire exists by burning.

The one seeking to demonstrate the power of spiritual realization in everyday affairs should believe in Divine guidance... and that everything in life is controlled by love, harmony, and peace.

Men do not so much hate an evil-doer, or evil itself, as they hate the man who calls evil by its real name.

I'm not a person that's walkin' down the street looking mean all day.

You're going to be unemployed if you really think you just have to sit around and wait for the muse to land on your shoulder.

I used to be too subjective, and I was always tempted to find my inner self in the exterior and dissipate my imagination on other people and on life.

We have managed to make the celebration of diversity our mode of resistance.