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 are in need of another vision.

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 experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.

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 we acted solely upon our impulse we'd probably go to war.

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

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 something to you besides just the academic way in which they fall in place.

Getting to the pint where the other is not the enemy is a big leap.

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

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 aesthetic identity.

I don't know any women who don't think about what they look like, and I don't know any men who don't think about what women look like.

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

As you know from reading many of these Negro writers, we don't deal too much with the discussion of democracy and what it means and how improvisation fits in all that.

The discussion of ideas as opposed to the American narcissistic obsession with what's going on with the self, that's the general thing people are talking about.

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

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

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

You can meet a young person who goes to school and is really enthusiastic, but if a sufficiently strong personality convinces them that this is a waste of time, that person might flunk out.

Unfortunately, I'm not a person that's always capable of living up to the Boy Scout philosophy.

Louis Armstrong, who learned to be in exquisite dress, came from the bottom, and he's not a trash can.

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

When people conclude that all is futile, then the absurd becomes the norm.

When you're artistic director of a program, you present the music you want to present.

Now the writing in the head, I definitely do every day, thinking about how I want to phrase something or how I'd like to rephrase something I've already written.

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 against those who put products on the market that are dangerous to their buyers.

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 that's not committed by the Mafia is done by the CIA.

Under popular culture's obsession with a naive inclusion, everything is O.K.

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 are in need of another vision.

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 contrivances.

I also wanted to do something that I hadn't really seen in almost any black novels, which was a complex love story in which both people were extremely intelligent and talented and understood a lot of things and were still at odds getting it together.

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

In America, we have to learn to be patient enough to figure out what somebody is saying. Somebody might actually be saying something.

The grand irony, however, is that Southern segregation was not brought to an end, nor redneck violence dramatically reduced, by violence.

This is the patent age of new inventions for killing bodies, and for saving souls. All propagated with the best intentions.

Just able barely to mount a horse and ride about a little in the spring of 1866, my life was threatened daily, and I was forced to go heavily armed. The whole country was then full of militia, robbing, plundering and killing.

In the First World War, there was the sudden passion of nationalism, and the killing took place because of these emotions. But the Soviet case is different, because you had systematic murder, like the Holocaust.

Towns are suffering from all these things, we should unite until we are all satisfied, man cannot be killing each other as if we were animals, as if we had no culture; that is a lack of culture.

I need to die for the killing of those people.

But when I don't smoke I scarcely feel as if I'm living. I don't feel as if I'm living unless I'm killing myself.

You are dealing with people who have taken the responsibility of killing their own because they think that they are right, they think that they are serving the interests of their people. They not going to give that up easily, just because you've shown up.

I didn't want to kill a man. I'm not capable of killing a man. I wanted to kill a tyrant.

The person who is bent on killing you will follow you wherever you are.

So what if I'm smokin' weed onstage and doing what I gotta do? It's not me shooting nobody, stabbing nobody, killing nobody. It's a peaceful gesture and they have to respect that and appreciate that.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Let me say this as clearly as I can: No matter how sharp a grievance or how deep a hurt, there is no justification for killing innocents.

I would, therefore, say that for no reason whatsoever, except in self-defence, should one think of killing any animal.

Unhappiness is not knowing what we want and killing ourselves to get it.

We're in an illusion about what our role is in world politics and foreign affairs, and our policies are killing and destroying and doing a lot of things that we are not aware of.

Unprovoked attacks on Israel's borders, murdering Israeli soldiers, taking Israeli hostages and showering rockets targeting and killing Israeli civilians are not furthering any legitimate goal.

War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.