When I'm on stage, I'm trying to do one thing: bring people joy.

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.

Sometimes life is a constant battle against the nostalgia of a time that can never be real again.

Whoever had said that appearances were deceiving was only partially right

What does God hate or punish except self-will? Let self-will cease, and there will be no hell. On what does that fire feed except on self-will?

History is sinking and only a very few seem dimly aware that things are getting bad.

I just want to be a nice girl from the Midwest - I don't want to have to act like a heavy to be taken seriously, and I resent that I have to be so pushy and political sometimes just to do my job.

All other nations are drinking Ray Charles beer and we are drinking Barry Manilow.

Meditation changes your character.

On first blush, Hold 'em seems like a ridiculously simple game.

The possession of gold has ruined fewer men than the lack of it. What noble enterprises have been checked and what fine souls have been blighted in the gloom of poverty the world will never know.

The equation Bubble Tea = Something to Look Forward To depressurizes the misery of capitalism and is a Hello Kitty band-aid on the festering wound of Neo-Liberalism.