Quotes About Community

I just hope everybody stays with us. We are not trying to be snobs or jerks. We are in a whirlwind trying to figure out the best way to be accessible.

When the great jazz and blues clubs closed - joints where the cash register rang loudly and there wasn't ESPN on TV over the bandstand, and people smoked cigarettes and drank whiskey and hollered 'Play on!' - When those places closed, I was pretty much done.

Pre-show, I warm up my voice, stretch, do a little team huddle, and sometimes throw a shot of whiskey in there, too. After the show, I hang out at merch meeting people and signing things. After that, I usually try to see friends in whatever city we're in, or if I'm super beat, listen to a podcast and pass out.

My mom told us never to reveal that we were Shia in school. You would find out that some other kid was Shiite, and you would whisper, 'Hey,' or you would see someone at the mosque, and you'd be like, 'Hey, that kid's Shiite!' There was a lot of tension, a lot of violence in Karachi between Shiites and Sunnis.

As social animals, we need to exchange juicy tales about someone - to connect with one another. For millions of years our forebears must have sat around the campfire, whispering about everyone they knew.

I can't replicate how I feel when that whistle goes on nights like that, knowing you've won it, that people are going home smiling. You don't get that sat on my tractor in Plymouth or doing the shop in Tesco.

My dad was president of the volunteer fire department, which was within walking distance to our house. I spent several days of each week there with him - any time the whistle blew, he went. It was truly inspiring to watch him lead that way.

There is not a liberal America and a conservative America - there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and latino America and asian America - there's the United States of America.

When you get to know a lot of people, you make a great discovery. You find that no one group has a monopoly on looks, brains, goodness or anything else. It takes all the people - black and white, Catholic, Jewish and Protestant, recent immigrants and Mayflower descendants - to make up America.

A lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people.

Our people are ebbing away like a rapidly receding tide that will never return. The white man's God cannot love our people, or He would protect them.

My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong.

Here's the thing, we talk about diversity in the media as if it's some weird artificial construct that we're putting onto these narratives. But it isn't. Our world is not homogenous. It is not all straight or white or able-bodied, or if it is, maybe you should make some new friends. That is not what our world looks like.

I think every group of black guys should have at least one white guy in it.

You go to a Rico Nasty show and there's gay people, trans people, white people and black people all in the mosh pit together, and it's beautiful.

Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.

South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.

My encounters with racism are sort of second-hand situations where I might be standing around with a group of white friends and someone makes a comment that they wouldn't make at my family reunion.

I have black friends, but I don't just hang out with black kids. I might pull up with Indian kids, white kids, black kids, whatever.

My mother is white. My biological father is black. When my mother was 17, she got pregnant. They lived in Waterloo, Iowa, which at the time in 1971 was a very segregated society.

Black people can be the most conservative, the most discriminating. Especially among ourselves. It wasn't white people who said all black men have to wear baggy jeans.

Unfortunately, as I tell my white friends, we, as black people, we're never going to be successful - not because of you white people but because of other black people. When you're black, you have to deal with so much crap in your life from other black people.

The United States is not a nation of black and white people. Any fool can see that white people are not really white, and that black people are not black.

When the human race neglects its weaker members, when the family neglects its weakest one - it's the first blow in a suicidal movement. I see the neglect in cities around the country, in poor white children in West Virginia and Virginia and Kentucky - in the big cities, too, for that matter.