Brian McKnight

He knows I rip him off every day. He’s the godfather for me. Nobody can say they aren’t influenced by what Stevie Wonder has done.

There’s no substitute to being successful on an actual chart.

You can’t listen to what people who aren’t musical have to say. When Anytime was released, I had bad reviews, and at first I was hurt. Your songs are like your children. You don’t want to hear, ‘Your kid is ugly.’ But I knew the record was good and it would sell.

I think the idea of a love song has changed. Most of the love songs we all loved as kids would be classified as funeral dirges now, you know, really super slow. I think nowadays the ballad has changed. It can have some up-tempo, some drums, some other things. ‘Forever’ would still be considered a ballad, I guess, but the tempo is probably more of a mid-tempo. The content is love song. I don’t know how to write anything else.

It is great to have your own label; you can cultivate your own artists… I’ve worked with pretty much everyone I wanted to.

I am a writer – that is what I am before being a performer or musician. I love waking up in the morning and then going to sleep that night with something that did not exist.

Kim Jong-un is 27 years old. His father dies, took over a regime. So say what you want but that is not easy, especially at that age.

Why can’t we use nuclear weapons?

The understanding that a third world war could be the end of civilization should restrain us from taking extreme steps on the international arena that are highly dangerous for modern civilization.

Nobody believes the official spokesman… but everybody trusts an unidentified source.

Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.

I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves. And I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent, black young women playing with their dogs on the White House lawn.

The media may feel obligated to carry extremely dubious stories and mute criticism in order not to offend their sources and disturb a close relationship. It is very difficult to call authorities on whom one depends for daily news liars, even if they tell whoppers.

About 70% of the public, the lowest 70% on the income scale, are pretty much disenfranchised. Their attitudes have no detectable influence on the policies of their own representatives. As you move up the scale you get a bit more influence. When you get to the top, policy is made.

I mean, any issue of any complexity is going to have some diversity of opinion. But when you get a unanimous vote to kill the Iranian deal or the Affordable Care Act or whatever the next thing may be, you know you’re not dealing with a political party.

The blacks want always Democrats … You know it’s like the plan they did, to take the fathers out the home and put them on welfare … Does anybody know about that? That’s a Democratic plan.

Europe has found itself confronted with fresh challenges – challenges of a global character, the nature of which is directly connected with changes in the international climate and the difficulties of seeking new models for co-operation.

When the Americans could no longer protect Barbie, they moved him over to the Vatican-run ‘ratline’, where Croatian Nazi priests and others managed to spirit him off to Latin America. There he continued his career as a big drug lord and narco-trafflcker.

Syria is geographically and politically in the middle of the Middle East.

I would not use the term “totalitarian” to refer to the American system of “brainwashing under freedom.” It is, nevertheless, a remarkably effective system, a fact that is rarely recognized, analyzed or understood.

A society that does not recognize that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom.