Quotes from Stanley Crouch

In America, we have to learn to be patient enough to figure out what somebody is saying. Somebody might actually be saying something.

Getting to the pint where the other is not the enemy is a big leap.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.

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 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.

In Ellington, we hear the story of the Negro, maybe the most American of Americans.

If you got the grits, serve 'em!

I don't write things to shock people, necessarily, but sometimes, when making an argument… Let me put it this way: Some people go out into a field of wheat and they'll pick something- just one thing that they like. However, other people will drive a thresher through there. Sometimes, if I have a choice, I'll just drive the thresher through.

It may sound cruel...but...what makes a criminal is a disposition toward cruelty, a laziness and impatience that lead to taking from others, and cynicism that pretends there is a war going on, and that the victims are the result of a conflict that somebody else started. "[Caligula and DeSade] were expressing through the license of...power their outrage and boredom, and apparently meaningless lives. That these attitudes have filtered down to the lower classes is what is new.

I am still fascinated by all the different ways [Charles Mingus] and Dannie Richmond came up with to play time. I had never heard before (and have rarely heard since) a bassist and a drummer who could so dramatically affect the direction and intensity of the music.

At that time, Charlie Parker was trying to work up on something," recalled his friend Clarence Davis, "but he didn't know what he was doing. He was fishing, but nothing was biting.

I don't write things to shock people, necessarily, but sometimes, when making an argument… Let me put it this way: some people go out into a field of wheat and they'll pick something– just one thing that they like. However, other people will drive a thresher through there. Sometimes, if I have a choice, I'll just drive the thresher through. Sometimes I think that's what's called for...

Louis Armstrong, who learned to be in exquisite dress, came from the bottom, and he's not a trash can.