Setting an example for your children takes all the fun out of middle age Conditions are never just right. People who delay action until all factors are favorable do nothing.

You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.

To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.

Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

Don't do what you can do - try what you can't do.

There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn't fool with booze until he's fifty; then he's a damn fool if he doesn't.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.

The person you hurt the most in this world was the person that brought you into it.

Because a sound tree doesn't have bad roots, Amara. No enterprise of greatnessbegins with treachery, with lying to the people who trust and love you

Tomorrow is like 'there.' Once you get 'there, ' it is called 'here.' So, technically, life is a set of Todays.

If we hope to give our children a chance, it's time we start giving our teachers a chance.

Music is still part of my spiritual life. Sometimes I sing my prayers. When I get audiences singing, I hope I'm helping them feel connected to something beyond themselves.

Even Heaven would be Hell to some people because they'd be too close to God!

Soul Mountain, the story of one man’s quest for inner peace and freedom.

They were missing all the enthusiasm, the creativity; that whole excitement about the music was lost. A lot of people are really going back looking for that.

I really appreciate anyone trying to inject art into mainstream film.

I enjoy doing different kinds of things. I just enjoy being not tied too much. I feel that I'm tied to myself as a kind of traditional musician and a singer, and the history that I have ties me down.