I just don't think one person has that much to contribute to any subject.

I was at the Smithsonian for twenty years, and I'm still at the Smithsonian as a curator emeritus, and I still plan to figure out what that means for me at this point in my life.

I think the Civil Rights Movement changed that trajectory for me. The first thing I did was leave school. I was suspended for my participation in Movement demonstrations in my hometown, December, 1961.

The Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, actually, was an effort to put something on the mall in Washington so American tourists could walk through America, and in their minds everything on the mall would be American.

Personally I discovered that you could go through the academy as a young scholar, come out, and almost immediately have an impact on the academic environment.

When I started graduate school I was interested in the culture of the Civil Rights Movement.

At the same time all this was happening, there was a folk song revival movement goingon, so the commercial music industry was actually changed by the Civil Rights Movement.

In fact when Sweet Honey was ten years old it was too big for me to run, and I knew it, but I ran it for another thirteen years because I couldn't convince other people to really do it. And this year, I'm not running it.

The voice I have now, I got the first time I sang in a movement meeting, after I got out of jail... and I'd never heard it before in my life.

There is nowhere you can go and only be with people who are like you. Give it up.

Most people come out of their Ph.D. experience trying to prove themselves, trying to get ahead, trying to get published. You're scared everybody else is going to do your research and get your topic.

But I'm a historian. I wasn't interested in just being a producer, I was interested in doing research and presenting that research to a general public.

It makes sense that whatever the topic is, it's more compelling if you can provide the audience with a range of perspectives, and you can cross disciplines. And you don't have to control what people take out of it.

I organized Sweet Honey In The Rock in 1973. The music was sanity and balance.

So one of the things that happened with integration in the South is they found that the black teachers were much more educated than the white teachers.

One of the biggest things I understood in a program like that was that it allowed more young African American scholars to do field research in the Caribbean and in Africa than had ever happened before in the history of the country and since.

If I had been at a University I don't think I would have been able to have the experience I had in my Smithsonian work. I don't think I have been as successful.

Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are.

And I used to think that proof that I had religion was whether I knew how to sing all of the songs.

I learned that if you bring black people together, you bring them together with a song. To this day, I don't understand how people think they can bring anybody together without a song.

Well, the first time I ran into the term religion, people were asking whether you had any. You know, some people had religion and some people didn't have religion.

I just don't think one person has that much to contribute to any subject.

The first job I had with the Smithsonian was as a field researcher among African American communities in Southwest Louisiana and Arkansas for the festival.

I came out of the Civil Rights Movement, and I had a different kind of focus than most people who have just the academic background as their primary training experience.

I started graduate school in 1971, I started working at the Smithsonian in the festival in 1972. I went full-time at the Smithsonian in 1974. And I got my doctorate in 1975.

I went to a church where you could not sing out loud in the service until you had been saved.

If every moment is sacred, and If you are amazed and in awe most of the time when you find yourself breathing and not crazy, then you are in a state of constant thankfulness, worship and humility.

When the culture is strong, you've got this consistency where black people can grow up in these places with this voice just resonating about our special-ness in the universe. And I always say you're in trouble if you get too far away from that core that grounds you.

Lifes challenges are not supposed to paralyze you theyre supposed to help you discover who you are.

Life’s challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they’re supposed to help you discover who you are.

You never know what your parents are going to say when you tell them you're getting married - especially when it's with someone they haven't met yet.

I have, oddly, two ski houses - trying to sell one.

It's an honor for me to have the opportunity to work with Emilio Estefan.

Being the same is so last season.

Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men.

Mutual understanding is the main backbone of every happy relationship.

I'd never have written the big books in London.

The layman's constitutional view is that what he likes is constitutional and that which he doesn't like is unconstitutional.

Like the Devil, the Norway lobster is known by a variety of different names: cigala in Spain, langoustine in France, Dublin Bay Prawn in Ireland. And in Italy, as well as the U.K., scampi.

If you are not happy with your life it is most probably because you have eagle eyes to see the negative parts of your life and almost blind to the beautiful side

People's jobs are the biggest asset that they have. The net present value of your job is worth more than your house or your stock portfolio. As people decide whether they're going to buy a car, they're more concerned about whether they have a job and are likely to have a job next year.

Every individual acts and suffers in accordance with his peculiar teleology, which has all the inevitability of fate, so long as he does not understand it.

Nationalism and anti-nationalism is a matter of perception. You cannot mandate who is a nationalist and what is not.

I think we are intrinsically prone to being irrational and superstitious. A lot of it comes from our fear of the unknown and the fear of a lack of control over our fate.

I'm half-Welsh, half-Russian. My maternal grandmother is Russian. I've very much a mongrel, which is good in a way because it makes me quite a blank canvas.

I like being a mother. For some people, it's so much work that it can be a burden. But it's not for me, maybe because I had my daughter, Valentina, later on in life, at 41.

I think my dad is highly gender-neutral. If he doesn't like someone, he'll articulate that, and I think it's also part of what resonates about him. He'll say what he's thinking.

We understand death only after it has placed its hands on someone we love.

When I realized that you can't necessarily be cast in a really great part living in Austin, even when Hollywood comes to town, I got a demo reel together and headed out west.