The thing about hip-hop today is it's smart, it's insightful. The way they can communicate a complex message in a very short space is remarkable.

You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

Keep exploring. Keep dreaming. Keep asking why. Don’t settle for what you already know. Never stop believing in the power of your ideas, your imagination, your hard work to change the world.

When ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, you don't really have to do anything, you just let them talk.

Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.

Change is never easy, but always possible.

Don’t ever let anybody tell you that your efforts don’t matter or that your voice doesn’t count. Don’t ever believe that you can’t make a difference. You have.

Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up.

Learning to stand in somebody else's shoes, to see through their eyes, that's how peace begins. And it's up to you to make that happen. Empathy is a quality of character that can change the world.

If somebody is different from you, that's not something you criticize, that's something that you appreciate.

A scent of lavender cannot be put into words.

God forbid that I should ever teach any adaptation of the Gospel. But I contend that we may serve it up in any sort of dish that will induce the people to partake of it

It is easier to pretend to be what you are not than to hide what you really are; but he that can accomplish both has little to learn in hypocrisy.

For it must be very lonely being dead.

God, how I have wasted my life.

For victory is victory, however small, nor is its worth only from what follows from it.

I've got at least one tiny corner of the universe I can make just the way I want it.

One can thus state, without fear of being wrong, that every truly artistic production has been conceived and executed according to the principle of irregularity.

[If] man creates the problem, surely man can solve it.

The thinking of John Cage derived from Duchamp and Dada. I was not interested in that.