Apollo Records signed me for my gospel ability.

I didn't need to depend on the record company to publish my records.

Apollo Records signed me for my gospel ability.

I'm still amazed people remembered and didn't give up on me.

The secret was to just be cool, stay in God's graces, and work it out.

I walked out of the Chinese restaurant with a fat check, a record deal, and a box of shrimp egg foo yung!

The deals that were made for Black artists at that time were not the deals that were made for white artists.

I don't need to make a fortune, I need to survive.

Leonard Chess passed, and that was the end of the Chess label for that time.

I didn't do the marching down the streets, jumping in front of the lines and holding hands... that wasn't me.

I want to be a soul singer.

I was signed to MGM. I was in Vegas for sixteen weeks at the Sands Hotel.

That was my choice at that time, and I still say Nixon was a great president. A very beautiful and wise man.

As you grow older, you learn to understand life a little better.

You gotta do it with class and integrity. If not, you're gonna drag yourself through the mud.

But we didn't have the financial structure, like the right attorneys, the right managers, the right accountants, and we were going against the grain of what black entertainers is supposed to do.

We were using the record as a tool to invest money into real estate all through the South, because we were living in an era where the South was changing.

We had some problems - my children were kidnapped during that time, and it just changed my whole way of thinking, from being in show business and everything else.

If we could buy these properties and then invest in the Black community, with our own McDonald's, with our own Kentucky Fried Chickens, it was gonna be a great move.

I didn't need to borrow money from the record company, because if I had my own publishing company, and I had my own writers, I'd have enough to get and do whatever I wanted to do.

I should have my own publishing companies.

We were grooving, at that point, in the same direction, but remember, Roy Hamilton and myself were going into a path and a direction that had no programming.

My manager was Buddy Glee, who put me together with Mike Curb, and was basically the idea to bring some soul to the label and bring something different to the label besides the Hank Williams situation.

Sometimes its controversy, but we all have our choices that we make.

As you grow older you learn to understand life a little better.

Every American deserves to live in freedom, to have his or her privacy respected and a chance to go as far as their ability and effort will take them - regardless of race, gender, ethnicity or economic circumstances.

Never underestimate a child's ability to get into more trouble.

We have developed this unbelievable ability to deny. We have to. If we didn't, we'd go crazy.

To know how to hide one's ability is great skill.

It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humor.

The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee and I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun.

Handcuffing the ability of states and localities to develop clean fuels in the cheapest possible way, using local resources, is not sound or sensible policy.

I realised from a very early age that God gave me a gift, and that gift was to run, and I wanted to use it to the best of my ability.

My vocal ability is very limited, but I'm fortunate in that I can write the songs around my vocal limitations.

The key to Operations at Wal-Mart is their ability to maintain the highest standards while at the same time getting things done with lockstep execution.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

The Stones are a different kind of group. I realized that when I joined them. It's not really so much their musical ability, it's just they have a certain kind of style and attitude which is unique.

I liked his ability to deal with a lot of the negativity that surrounded him. Even though he was in a world that he didn't want to be in, he still saw the bigger picture.

We have the most flexible and adaptive economy. Making sure we sustain the ability of the American economy to perform well is really the priority of economic policy.

The system that enables the most people to earn the most success is free enterprise, by matching up people's skills, interests, and abilities. In contrast, redistribution simply spreads money around. Even worse, it attenuates the ability to earn success by perverting economic incentives.

Excellence is the unlimited ability to improve the quality of what you have to offer.

War should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes as ability to execute, military plans.

Get that right, then- if you get the quality right, then the marketability or whatever; your ability to sell videos or your ability to earn money or whatever, will follow naturally. But try to be creatively lead rather than market lead. And that's important to me.

You have to open your mind. I like the ability to express myself in a deep way. It's the closest music to our humanity - it's like a folk music that rises up out of a culture.

I ask the American people to consider the legacy this administration has handed us in the defense budget as we spend billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars without the tools and ability to track these dollars.

I didn't have any problem bonding with Honey, but I was plagued with insecurities about my ability to bring up my baby.

The greatest luck that I've had has been the ability to find men and women who came into my administration who worked with me and brought extraordinary talents that we were able to take full advantage of.

My power is the ability to control water molecules and form them into ice.

Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.