Dave Brubeck

It’s Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, you know. They got a musical mind together and uh, you can’t explain it.

Get out there and improvise and take chances and don’t be a perfectionist.

It’s like a whole orchestra, the piano for me.

Jazz stands for freedom.

No person in their right mind would want to put their family through what I’ve had to put my family through.

There’s a way of playing safe and then there’s where you create something you haven’t created before.

Do not confuse motion and progress. A rocking horse keeps moving but does not make any progress.

Many people seem to believe that Greenfield Village and the Edison Institute and Museum at Dearborn, with their specimens of earlier type of American life and industry, are just a kind of antiquarian hobby of mine. I do not deny that they have given me a great deal of interest and pleasure. But the project is vastly more than a hobby. It has very definite purposes, and I hope will have results lasting down the years. One purpose is to remind the public who visit it and sometimes there are thousands a day–of how farand how fast we have come in technical progress in the last century or so. If we have come so far and so fast, is it likely that we shall stop now?

The things you own end up owning you.

If you foul up, tell the President and correct it fast. Delay only compounds mistakes.

We want to have something of everything-we have types of every sort of wagon and carriage ever used in this country, from the covered wagon of the pioneer to the last style of buggy. We have nearly every type of agricultural instrument, every type of musical instrument, we have all kinds and sorts of furniture and household effects. One of these days the collection will have its own museum at Dearborn, and there we shall reproduce the life of the country in its every age.

To me, you’ll always be the rising suns, the sinking moons, and all the stars that come between the sound of rain and river stones, the warmth of my sheets, the ache in my bones.

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.

People don’t like when you point out to them and remind them that they’re not very smart.

If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much.

I don’t like when there’s too much conversation because I’m shy and it makes me uncomfortable.

Zen teaches that if we can open up to the inevitability of our demise, we can begin to transform and lighten up about it.

Never trust anyone who wants what you’ve got. Friend or no, envy is an overwhelming emotion.

Individualism is what makes cooperation worth living.

If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.

The most closely organized groups and movements in the world are those which have been the least friendly to the people’s progress and liberty.