Duke Ellington

It’s like an act of murder; you play with intent to commit something.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

There is no art without intention.

There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind.

If it sounds good and feels good, then it IS good!

Music is what I hear and something that I live by.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

I can only say that I have had a wonderful life.

Coming together is the beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.

I grew up in athletics, where people keep score.

If you keep your head in the sand, you don’t know where the kick’s coming from.

The way out of life and death is not some special technique; essential thing is to penetrate to the root of life and death.

Think about all of the times, situations, and circumstances where you have gotten caught up in making your self right rather than happy… The harder you fight to win, the bigger you lose.

Whoever is happy will make others happy too.

You are writing your children’s future with your answers.

They’re different kinds of challenges depending upon what phase of life I’m in.

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.

A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words… the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.

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.

Be ready to revise any system, scrap any method, abandon any theory, if the success of the job requires it.

A committee can make a decision that is dumber than any of its members.