You must be willing to accept the fact that pain is a part of the process of revelation..

But the myth of violent solutions as the ultimate solutions maintains itself in much of popular media..

Our society has gotten to the point where we might soon become less and less shocked by any kind of violence..

You'd never know that listening to people in the UN but tribalism is the father of racism..

Popular culture tells you that schools and parents don't know what's going on, the police are dogs, politicians are all liars and scum, and any crime….

All of us are made up of the stories that we listen to, the ones we disagree with and the ones that we agree with..

Big business, for all its lobbying, is often put in line by investigative reporting, public scandals and multi-million-dollar judgments in court agai….

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric….

The extent of his influence across jazz, across American music, and around the world has such continuing stature that he is one of the few who can ea….

When a violent minority that crosses color lines comes to believe that killing those you know or do not know is a reasonable solution to problems, we….

Rap actually comes out of punk rock, not black music..

People don't really think other people are the same..

I wanted to get to that aesthetic proposition that comes out of learning the human elements of a world, so that those notes and rhythms mean somethin….

Our democratic richness arrives when we're able to comprehend our collective humanity accurately..

If there's an intellectual highway, there's also an intellectual subway..

What we need in America is a renaissance. We need to go forward by going backward..

The high point of civilization is that you can hate me and I can hate you but we develop an etiquette that allows us to deal with each other because ….

If you're going to get in the ring and try to take the belt, you have to prepare to get hit..

Your ethnic or sexual identity, what region of the country you're from, what your class is - those aspects of your identity are not the same as your ….

Everybody has to be reminded that there's another way to be. Another more mysterious, unpredictable way to be that's not necessarily based upon contr….

The point is, you have an ethnic heritage and you have a human heritage. Your human heritage includes everything of human value..