"You've got to be a thermostat rather than a thermometer. A thermostat shapes the climate of opinion; a thermometer just reflects it."

"To be human is to be fallible, to be fragile, to be finite."

"We have to be militants for kindness, subversive for sweetness and radicals for tenderness."

"At our best. Now, I'm not romanticizing black people, because we've got gangsters like everybody else. [laughs] But oh, Lord, we got some great ones."

"I'm a bluesman in the academy. I sing the blues, but I do it with footnotes."