Quotes About Legacy

My mom was a '70s mom. She paved a road that no one had yet walked.

People like Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Marlene Dietrich and Sammy Davis Jr. all walked me down this path of entertainment.

I walked into this industry blond with red lips, and I will leave this industry blond with red lips. Mark my words.

Here I am at the turn of the millennium and I'm still the last man to have walked on the moon, somewhat disappointing. It says more about what we have not done than about what we have done.

I realized that my grandfather walked with Martin Luther King forty years ago. That was his dream. And in his little way, he helped us get closer to where we are today.

There's a staircase on the first floor of the Capitol that I walk every day. It's made of marble, and as you walk those steps, you think of those who've walked before you. You think of the challenges that the country's faced.

My father led by example. He wasn't much of a talker - he walked life.

When I went back to my old high school, all these kids looking at me like I'm the real big homie, the same way I look at Jay Z, Nas, or Dr. Dre. You would've thought Michael Jackson walked through that joint off the excitement that they had.

I've walked on a lot of battlefields. Most of them are not haunted.

I know when the Berlin wall went down and I walked into what was East Berlin and saw two big Nike banners - that gave me a chill.

A guy like James Brown has walked the walk, talked the talk. I can't disrespect James Brown in any kind of way. In my household, the adults tell you where to get off at.

People were watching the TV set, and they said three rock-and-rollers died - Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, The Big Bopper, including the pilot. I walked out of the hotel. I got on the bus alone. Their clothes were hanging on the racks, their guitars on the seats.

I mean, my dad, is really the biggest leadership influence in my life and I believe Jesus was the greatest leaders that ever lived and I think He had the most impact on humanity of anybody who ever walked the planet.

I had an enormous responsibility not just to survive but to become a good man because I had all of my family's hopes on my shoulders because they walked around outside without the shield that I carried knowing I hadn't done anything.

In many ways, my life has begun before I was born. It began in the moment my mother Malka walked out of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

I walked into Eddie Graham's office, he took one look at me and said, 'You look a lot like Sam Steamboat. We're going to make you his nephew - Ricky Steamboat.'

Madam Walker, as part of the first generation out of slavery, really was inventing the way that she operated in the world.

My father, Jimmy Walker, was the first pick in the 1967 draft, but I never met him. He passed in 2007. I found out about him in middle school. I was old enough to understand who he was, where he went to college, and what his game was about. Older players like Bill Russell and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar have come up to me to talk about him.

We didn't sit around the dining table talking about Madam Walker, but the silverware that we used every day had her monogram on it and our china for special occasions had been Madam Walker's china... and the baby grand piano on which I learned to read music had been in A'Lelia Walker's apartment in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance.

The saying was that Madam Walker made the money, and her daughter - my great-grandmother - spent it.

T-Bone Walker was a big influence on just about every guitar player around.

I hope that people will be inspired by Madam Walker's story. I hope that they will see her as a complex human being, and that they will want to dig more deeply, that they will want to know the details of her life.

Madame Walker selected Indianapolis as the headquarters for her growing business more than a century ago in 1910 because of its central location and thriving black business community.

Many people have told me that once they learn of Madam Walker's accomplishments they are surprised, even embarrassed, that they have never heard of her. But they shouldn't be. Her extraordinary story was simply omitted from the history books.