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

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.

Our military commanders have said over and over again that a timetable for withdrawal sends the wrong message to our troops, but more importantly to our enemy.

Every dictator is an enemy of freedom, an opponent of law.

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

There are a lot of people out there who think that I am their worst enemy, and I don't even care if these people exist.

By this time it was past six, and the enemy's van and ours were at too great a distance to engage, I perceived some of their ships stretching to the northward; and I imagined they were going to form a new line.

To me our bombing policy appears to be suicidal. Not because it does not do vast damage to our enemy, it does; but because, simultaneously, it does vast damage to our peace aim, unless that aim is mutual economic and social annihilation.

Especially today as we fight the war on terror - against an enemy that represents hatred, extremism and stands behind no flag - we need to remember the sacrifices that have gone into protecting our flag.

No enemy is worse than bad advice.

The soldier's main enemy is not the opposing soldier, but his own commander.

This bored fantastic woman, with her animal nature, giving herself the pleasure of seeing her enemy struck down, not a particularly keen one for her because she is so weary of having all her desires satisfied.

Reason is the enemy of faith.

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

If I liken the Pacific War to a football match, I can say to you that the first half is over, we have kicked off after the interval, and we are going to carry the ball into enemy territory for a smashing victory.

Wine is a turncoat; first a friend and then an enemy.

I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

Hatred is not contained in political thinking. Any hatred worked up against the public enemy is non-political, and always shows some weakness in the internal political situation.

No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.