Critic

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.