I don't want to read a book that's depressing.

Anyone can write your own life story.

Caring is beyond race. Either people care about you, or they don't.

I just love music, and I love what music does for people.

My wife and kids like the quiet and the countryside - I still find that kind of quiet hard to listen to.

When you glorify violence, then it comes back to bite you.

The abolitionists were not like the rugged people out West, and they were not like John Brown, either. They were people who made speeches and did politics.

If you meet your heroes, you're always going to be disappointed. Frederick Douglass was a great man, but would I want my daughter to marry him? Probably not. That doesn't mean that I don't think he's a great man.

James Brown was the Monday-to-Friday guy. He was the hardest man in show business. He was like your dad and your uncle: He showed up, and he hit hard.

Until you expose the cancer, you can't fix it.

I don't like a bunch of writers sitting around, puffing smoke, they like this book, he wrote this - tell me a dirty joke, you know. It's just not my style, I've never been that kind of person.

James Brown's life was really a metaphor for our inability to talk about matters like race and class in America.

People call him a terrorist, but you can use language to do many things and say many things about people, but John Brown was a hero.

I don't like living around too many fancy-pantsy folks. That ain't my thing. I'm not into phony people.

Every time I see something about the Wild West, I'm reminded that our version of history may not be what really happened.

Atticus Finch is, you know, he was just his whole - the business of his modesty and his ability to see tomorrow and to try to buttress his knowledge of what was coming for his kids was something that I'll never - as a father I'm not able to do.

People don't realize you're blowing over changes, time changes, harmony, different keys. I mark a point in my solo where it's got to peak at point D I go to A, B, C D then I'm home.

Unlike despotisms, modern democracies are not supposed promiscuously to accumulate property and then charge their taxpayers to maintain it. But that is what they do. Governments are always trying to extend their responsibilities and their estates, and it is very hard for parliaments to reign them in.

When Gordon the Brown, in London in 1997, commissioned a great inquisition or survey of his new realm, the result was the so-called national asset register, which was immediately dubbed by the boomers of the UK Treasury 'the modern Domesday Book.'

Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born revolutionary who is believed by most Arab and Iranian observers to be the inspiration of the attacks in New York and Washington, is the best known of the Islamic militants to have emerged in the past 20 years and the least difficult to fathom.

Of all the failed technologies that litter the onward march of science - steam carriages, zeppelins, armoured trains - none has been so catastrophic to prosperity as the last century's attempt to generate electricity from nuclear fission.

Liberty in Islam is the liberty to be a Muslim, democracy likewise, individualism likewise.

Saudi Arabia operates according to the belief that God made young men and women so utterly and completely without self-control that they must be physically segregated every moment of the day and night.

Saudi Arabia is a puritanical state that claims a monopoly of wisdom and virtue.