B. B. King

I’m more careful about my hands than about what I eat and most anything else, because my hands have been my living. My hands have been able to help me learn. My hands have taken me around the world. So I’m very proud of my hands.

I don’t like to feel that I owe anything. I like to feel that I pay my own way – there’s no free lunch. And when people give me all these great compliments, I thank them but still go back to my room and practice. And a lot of times I say to myself ‘I wish I could be worthy of all the compliments that people give me sometime.’ I am not inventing anything that’s going to stop cancer or muscular distrophy or anything, but I like to feel that my time and talent is always there for the people that need it.

The problem is that a lot of the blues stations are late on Saturday night, and like a lot of people, I ain’t no vampire!

My dad died, I think, at 87. So I’ll be lucky if I make 87. But in a lot of cases, the younger people live longer than their parents. And they know more. My dad used to tell me he ate the hog from his rooter to his tooter. So do I when I’m not trying to lose weight.

Sometimes I just think that there are more things to be said to make the audience understand what I’m trying to do more. When I’m singing, I don’t want you to just hear the melody. I want you to relive the story, because most of the songs have pretty good storytelling.

We all have idols. Play like anyone you care about, but try to be yourself while you’re doing so.

Each position, each metre of the Soviet territory must be stubbornly defended, to the last drop of blood. We must cling to every inch of Soviet soil and defend it to the end!

?The party that leans upon the workers but serves the bourgeoisie, in the period of the greatest sharpening of the class struggle, cannot but sense the smells wafted from the waiting grave.

If people don’t like Marxism, they should blame the British Museum.

Advance towards socialism cannot but cause the exploiting elements to resist the advance, and the resistance of the exploiters cannot but lead to the inevitable sharpening of the class struggle.

So what the media do, in effect, is to take the set of assumptions which express the basic ideas of the propaganda system, whether about the Cold War or the economic system or the national interest and so on, and then present a range of debate within that framework-so the debate only enhances the strength of the assumptions, ingraining them in people’s minds as the entire possible spectrum of opinion that there is.

The press must grow day in and day out – it is our Party’s sharpest and most powerful weapon.

I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.

People love me. And you know what, I have been very successful. Everybody loves me.

I don’t think I’m going to lose, but if I do, I don’t think you’re ever going to see me again, folks. I think I’ll go to Turnberry and play golf or something.

Ample work in mainstream political science shows that a majority of voters are not represented by their own elected representatives, who listen to different voices – the voices of the donor class, great wealth and the corporate sector.

No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

[on Jeremy Cobyn] It is a different type of Labour Party. Can it be taken back? I don’t know

The strengthening of our statehood is, at times, deliberately interpreted as authoritarianism.

The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA-infected people back. People that go to far away places to help out are great – but must suffer the consequences!

To fear the world we have organized and led for three quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership, and our duty to remain the last, best hope of Earth, for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems, is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.