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" I'm an old Coltrane disciple just like I'm a Christian. "

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" I have nothing against rich brothers and sisters. Pray for 'em every day. But callousness and indifference, greed and avarice is something that's shot through all of us. "

" It's impossible to translate Wall Street greed into one or two demands. "

" Poor people and working people have not been the focus of the Obama administration. That for me is not just a disappointment but a kind of betrayal. "

" There is something about boldness and fearlessness and being free enough to speak what is on one's mind that warrants freedom. "

" Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse. "

" Every president needs to deal with the permanent government of the country, and the permanent government of the country is Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats and the questions becomes what is the relationship between that president and Wall Street. "

" I'm against genocide. I'm against fascism. I'm willing to fight against them so that, in that sense, I think one can still be committed to justice and committed to peace but recognize the circumstances under which one does have to fight. "

" Barack Obama commits war crimes - Somalia, Yemen. He commits war crimes in Pakistan, Afghanistan. Martin Luther King Jr. tried to keep a spotlight on war crimes, to keep track of the innocents killed... There is a major clash. "

" I am excited to have a black president because white supremacy is real and it needs to be shattered. "

" Hey, you got something going here. I think we've got a chance for some progressive policy that actually focuses on poor and working people. "

" There has certainly been ugly, right-wing hatred targeting Barack Obama. "

" A neoliberal disaster is one who generates a mass incarceration regime, who deregulates banks and markets, who promotes chaos of regime change in Libya, supports military coups in Honduras, undermines some of the magnificent efforts in Haiti of working people, and so forth. "

" If they think they have issues with the president not doing enough for the poor now, wait and see what happens if the opposition takes office. Then they would really need a poverty tour. "

" My dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he's always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination. "

" The problem is we need much more moral content. "

" I take my fundamental cue from John Coltrane that says there must be a priority of integrity, honesty, decency, and mastery of craft. "

" You've got to be a thermostat rather than a thermometer. A thermostat shapes the climate of opinion; a thermometer just reflects it. "

" There is always a very delicate interplay between individual actions and institutional conditions. But there is no such thing as institutional conditions without any individual actions and no such thing as individual action without institutional conditions. So there is always personal responsibility. "

" If you view life as a gold rush, you're going to end up worshiping a golden calf. And when you call for help, and that golden calf can't respond, you go under. "

" I'm not saying that President Obama should be exempt from criticism, nor do I believe it is some act of racial treason for a black person to hold our president accountable for his actions. "

" It's never a question of skin pigmentation. It's never a question of just culture or sexual orientation or civilization. It's what kind of human being you're going to choose to be from your mama's womb to the tomb and what kind of legacy will you leave. "

" We will not allow this day of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial to go without somebody going to jail. "

" Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists. "

" Martin Luther King Jr. was not just a man of peace. He was a radical pacifist, and so he was against war across the board. "

" We want an economic team, Paul Krugman and Robert Kuttner, Joseph Steiglitz's people and others, who say, you know what? We're sophisticated economists but we're concerned about poor and working people. "

" Larry Summers, I think, he had a long history of arrogance and relative ignorance about poor people's culture and working people's culture and so forth. "

" There is no fundamental social change by being simply of individual and interpersonal actions. You have to have organizations and institutions that make a fundamental difference. "

" Anytime I look at a president, I don't care what color he is. "

" I tend to be one who just speaks from my soul, and so what comes out sometimes is rather harsh. In that sense, I'm very much a part of the tradition of a Frederick Douglass or a Malcolm X who used hyperbolic language at times to bring attention to the state of emergency. "

" Part of the popularity with Louis Farrakhan has less to do with the content of his message and more to do with the form that he portrays himself - as being a free black person who speaks what is on his mind with boldness and fearlessness. Who is willing to pay the consequences. "