I'm kidding about having only a few dollars. I might have a few dollars more.

The one thing that can solve most of our problems is dancing.

Hair is the first thing. And teeth the second. Hair and teeth. A man got those two things he's got it all.

I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door, I'll Get It Myself)

I named my new son James Joseph Brown II. I think he's going to be a lot better than I was.

I only got a seventh-grade education, but I have a doctorate in funk, and I like to put that to good use

Sometimes you struggle so hard to feed your family one way, you forget to feed them the other way, with spiritual nourishment. Everybody needs that.

My music wasn't written by Mozart, Beethoven, Bach or Schubert. It's written by God and me. They go "a one and a two and up." We start on the downbeat. Bam! And that's where we got them.

I've got soul and I'm super bad.

You got to use what you got to get just what you want.

I taught them everything they know, but not everything I know.

You couldn’t control how your story started, but you can write a few good pages in there

Every social ethic is doomed to failure if it is blind to personal responsibility" (The Ten Commandments, 10).

I know this music from memory, not from the music.

As far as swing and techniques are concerned, I don't know diddly squat. When I'm playing well, I don't even take aim.

The hardest part, for real, is probably when you just don't feel like going on stage and being funny.

For our past can be a prison we are locked in permanently, or it can be the key to our freedom if we glean the lessons from it and deal with it directly.

Another way that you love your enemy is this: When the opportunity presents itself for you to defeat your enemy, that is the time which you must not do it.

I think it is to the advantage of my state to have the opportunity to come to meetings occasionally and to vote in person, rather than just by proxy.

The aesthetic experience has to be given. And beauty is a regular experience of every person - every person who is not clinically depressed!

But you held your pride like you should've held me