Gil Scott-Heron
I've always had questions about what it meant to be a protester, to be in the minority. Are the people who are trying to find peace, who are trying to have the Constitution apply to everybody, are they really the radicals? We're not protesting from the outside. We're inside.Collection: Peace
Music has the power to make me feel good like nothing else does. It gives me some peace for a while. Takes me back to who I really am.Collection: Music
Everything that's bad for you catches on too quickly in America, because that's the easiest thing to get people to invest in, the pursuits that are easy and destructive, the ones that bring out the least positive aspects of people.Collection: Positive
You know what has made me the happiest I've ever been? Seeing my son and daughter graduate from college. More than wanting them to be educated, I wanted them to be nice people. To see that they have become both is just a wonderful thing.Collection: Graduation
I have a novel that I can write. It's about three soldiers from Somalia. Some babies have been disappearing up on 144th Street, and I speculate later on what happened to them and how they might have been got back. These guys are dead, all three, and they have a chance in the afterlife to do something they should have done when they were alive.Collection: Chance
You have to learn and keep learning.Collection: Learning
Womenfolk raised me, and I was full-grown before I knew I came from a broken home.Collection: Home
Every once in a while, you live long enough to get the respect that people didn't want to give while you were trying to become a senior citizen.Collection: Respect
The way you get to know yourself is by the expressions on other people's faces, because that's the only thing that you can see, unless you carry a mirror about.
The revolution that takes place in your head, nobody will ever see that.
You see, revolution sounds like something that happens, like turning on the light switch, but actually it's moving a large obstacle, and a lot of folks' efforts to push it in one direction or the other have to combine.
I am honestly not sure how capable I am of love. And I'm not sure why.
Our accomplishments show what kind of people we are.
Schedule? I have no schedule. There is no hurry. I work when I want to.
If someone comes to you and asks for help, and you can help them, you're supposed to help them. Why wouldn't you? You have been put in the position somehow to be able to help this person.
If you aren't having no fun, die, because you're running a worthless program, far as I'm concerned.
I found my grandmother dead. It shook me up. I got up to make her breakfast, and I knew it was strange that she wasn't stirring. I went in to wake her, and she was laying in rigor mortis, and I'm done. I called next door, and the kid picked up the phone, and I was so wild, he dropped it.
If you're supposed to be doing something, the spirits will come and help you. They have helped me out with lines I shouldn't have known, chords I shouldn't have known. Every once in a while I get lines from somewhere, and I think, I better write this down.
I learnt early on that your audience take the songs in the way they want to rather than the way you might want them too.
My songs were always about the tone of voice rather than the words.
Well, I grew up on the blues, man!
Colour is not the issue in America; class is.
As for money - when I have it, it's great. When I don't, I go get some. I've been a dishwasher, a gardener, a cleaner.
Every show that sells out is like a hero's welcome for me.
Your life has to consist of more than 'Black people should unite.' You hope they do, but not twenty-four hours a day.
I was a piano player before I was a poet.
I was one of the first three black students to go to an all-white school in Tennessee.
I was a better writer when I was teaching. I was constantly going over the basics and constantly reminding myself, as I reminded my students, what made a good story, a good poem.
I tour more than I need to, more than is good for you. But it's my favorite part of music. I much prefer it to studio work.
You should be able to do anything you can afford as an adult.
I don't mind being criticized. I enjoy being criticized personally, not by rumor.
I cannot afford to watch Fox News.
I thought that some of my best records was when there wasn't a lot of work being done on it, like 'Winter in America' and 'Secrets' and when there weren't a whole lot of people in the studios.
I was born in Chicago, but I was raised in a town called Jackson, Tennessee. And a lot of these changes that were necessary and talked about it as important have been made, like, people go to school where they want to go. They work for equal pay, they work for - they can go school and have an equal shot at a job.
The first revolution is when you change your mindCollection: Mind
Nobody can do everything, but everybody can do something.Collection: Can Do Something
You will not be able to stay home, brother./You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out./You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,/Skip out for beer during commercials,/Because the revolution will not be televised.Collection: Brother
I am a black man dedicated to expression; expression of the joy and pride of blackness. I consider myself neither poet, composer, or musician. These are merely tools used by sensitive men to carve out a piece of beauty or truth that they hope may lead to peace and salvation.Collection: Pride
America .. the international Jekyll and Hyde ... the land of a thousand disguises, sneaks up on you but rarely surprisesCollection: America
Man is a complex being: he makes deserts bloom - and lakes die.Collection: Nature
All the dreams you show up in are not your own.Collection: Dream
If we meet somebody who has never made a mistake, lets help them start a religion. Until then, were just going to meet other humans and help to make each other better.Collection: Mistake
I try not to take people who haven't really thought out what they're doing too seriously. I try not to let them get in the way of what I feel I need to do.Collection: People
You see Martin Luther King is dead and Huey Newton is not. And Malcolm X is dead and Bobby Seale is not. And Vernon Jordan was shot. The thing that revolutionaries, or even people who want to claim they're revolutionaries, often forget is that it doesn't make no difference what kind of wardrobe you wear, and if you speak up about Black people doing better you just risked your life.Collection: Kings
The way you get to know yourself is by the expression on other people's faces.Collection: Expression
I think that the more people who speak out, and say things and take stands on positions that will better our community, the better off each and every other individual artist or otherwise, will be.Collection: Artist
Paul Robeson once said that the artist has the responsibility to either help liberate the community or further oppress it. And I think that when Eldridge Cleaver wrote it down it was interpreted as his, but there's a history of people saying things of that nature and meaning it. And what I do is in that tradition, in that mode.Collection: Responsibility
I would say if you are familiar with our history and the history of our art and literature that you see a clear cut pattern of people wanting to contribute, not only artistically, but in some practical purpose, for the benefits of the community.Collection: Art