God has plans, not problems for our lives.
You must leave this world a better place than it would have been if you had not existed.
The suburbanization and the ghettos that were created as a result of the limits of where [African-Americans] could live in the North [still exist today. ] And. . . the South was forced to change, in part because they were losing such a large part of their workforce through the Great Migration.
And in some ways, to me, that's one of the inspiring and powerful things about the Great Migration itself. There was no leader, there was no one person who set the date who said, 'On this date, people will leave the South. ' They left on their own accord for as many reasons as there are people who left. They made a choice that they were not going to live under the system into which they were born anymore and in some ways, it was the first step that the nation's servant class ever took without asking.
It occurred to me that no matter where I lived, geography could not save me.
People leave when life becomes untenable where they are.
That's one of the biggest losses, I think, to African American families, is that people, once they left, they turned away from the South. They didn't look back, and they often didn't tell their children about it. They didn't want to talk about it. It was too painful, what they'd gone through and the caste system of the South, which was Jim Crow.
I'm not in show business because I don't have to go to the meetings, I'm just not a part of it, I don't belong to it. When you "belong" to something. You want to think about that word, "belong. " People should think about that: it means they own you. If you belong to something it owns you, and I just don't care for that. I like spinning out here like one of those subatomic particles that they can't quite pin down.
It’s a basic rule of humor that a joke is always at somebody’s expense. Really good jokes, however, tend to be at everyone’s expense.
When I play it I look out and see people hold on to each other and dance or just couples leaning into each other and kiss. And I'll go: 'You know, I could have worked hard at school and been a dentist. But I'm so glad I didn't. ' Because when I look out and see that I feel like the Pied Piper of love.
Every action being taken against terrorists requires court order, requires scrutiny.