 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. |
| Our democratic richness arrives when we're able to comprehend our collective humanity accurately. |
| In America, we have to learn to be patient enough to figure out what somebody is saying. Somebody might actually be saying something. |
| 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. |
| People don't really think other people are the same. |
| 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. |
| When people conclude that all is futile, then the absurd becomes the norm. |
| 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. |
| When you're artistic director of a program, you present the music you want to present. |
| 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. |
| Under popular culture's obsession with a naive inclusion, everything is O.K. |
| Our society has gotten to the point where we might soon become less and less shocked by any kind of violence. |
| But the myth of violent solutions as the ultimate solutions maintains itself in much of popular media. |
| 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. |
| The grand irony, however, is that Southern segregation was not brought to an end, nor redneck violence dramatically reduced, by violence. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Unfortunately, I'm not a person that's always capable of living up to the Boy Scout philosophy. |
| You'd never know that listening to people in the UN but tribalism is the father of racism. |
