You can't play anything on a horn that Louis Armstrong hasn't played

Anybody can play. The note is only 20 percent. The attitude of the motherfucker who plays it is 80 percent.

It's not the note you play that's the wrong note - it's the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.

If somebody told me I only had an hour to live, I'd spend it choking a white man. I'd do it nice and slow.

It's not about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.

In music, silence is more important than sound.

I'm always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning... Every day I find something creative to do with my life.

Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery

Do not fear mistakes. There are none.

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

If you sacrifice your art because of some woman, or some man, or for some color, or for some wealth, you can't be trusted.

Stars are like animals in the wild. We may see the young but never the actual birth, which is a veiled and secret event.

Perhaps it wasn't age but what you were capable of, the lengths to which you were willing to go to get what you wanted, that mattered most.

He saw for the first time that he had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act.

Eighty percent of a picture is writing, the other twenty percent is the execution, such as having the camera on the right spot and being able to afford to have good actors in all parts.

What I strive to do through my work, is to teach compassion. You need to have a lot of it, in this day and time, and it's lacking.

There will be birds and if they write your name in the sky then you can get on the buses and if they don't you have to die on the floor.

The best of all teachers is the one who helps people so that eventually they don't need him.

I think you’re going to see tech bringing efficiencies to businesses that aren’t pure tech.

Abortion ... interferes with God's plan-a plan He willed before He created the universe.

The selfish leader will attempt to lead others for their own gain and for the detriment of others.