My mind. . . It's who I am. I think I'd rather suffer any other injury in the world than have my mind tampered with.
They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much. The laws that make grandmothers grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers mothers, cousins cousins, jam jam, and jelly jelly. It was a time when uncles became fathers, mothers lovers, and cousins died and had funerals. It was a time when the unthinkable became thinkable and the impossible really happened.
Since there is no one else to praise me, I will praise myself -- will say that I have never tampered with a single tooth in my thought machine, such as it is. There are teeth missing, God knows -- some I was born without, teeth that will never grow. And other teeth have been stripped by the clutchless shifts of history -- But never have I willfully destroyed a tooth on a gear of my thinking machine. Never have I said to myself, 'This fact I can do without.
I'm not keen on history being tampered with. . . to any extent.
Ours is not so much an age of vulgarity as of vulgarization; everything is tampered with or touched up, or adulterated or watered down, in an effort to make it palatable, in an effort to make it pay.
You're inviting hysteria with your boobs that are nearly showing nipple and your skirt that's nearly showing muff. You're exciting this hysteria that leads to a lack of control, which then leads to, "It wasn't my fault. " But naked, I have all the power because I got there before you did, and what is actually there is vulnerable, life-giving and hasn't been tampered with.
Black people's music is in a class by itself and always has been. There's nothing like it. The reason for that is because it was not tampered with by white people. It was not on the media. It was not anywhere except where black people were. And it is one of the art forms in which black people decided what is good in it. Nobody told them. What surfaced and what floated to the top, were the giants and the best.
I wish the world would become what God wanted it to be in the first place, before we tampered with it.
