Stanley Crouch Quotes

But there are a number of attitudes that should not be emotionally or psychologically ingested by young people.

When you're artistic director of a program, you present the music you want to present.

I wanted to get to that aesthetic proposition that comes out of learning the human elements of a world, so that those notes and rhythms mean something to you besides just the academic way in which they fall in place.

In America, we have to learn to be patient enough to figure out what somebody is saying. Somebody might actually be saying something.

When a violent minority that crosses color lines comes to believe that killing those you know or do not know is a reasonable solution to problems, we are in need of another vision.

But the myth of violent solutions as the ultimate solutions maintains itself in much of popular media.

When people conclude that all is futile, then the absurd becomes the norm.

Everybody has to be reminded that there's another way to be. Another more mysterious, unpredictable way to be that's not necessarily based upon contrivances.

Louis Armstrong, who learned to be in exquisite dress, came from the bottom, and he's not a trash can.

Big business, for all its lobbying, is often put in line by investigative reporting, public scandals and multi-million-dollar judgments in court against those who put products on the market that are dangerous to their buyers.

Your ethnic or sexual identity, what region of the country you're from, what your class is - those aspects of your identity are not the same as your aesthetic identity.

I don't know any women who don't think about what they look like, and I don't know any men who don't think about what women look like.

Unfortunately, I'm not a person that's always capable of living up to the Boy Scout philosophy.

Getting to the pint where the other is not the enemy is a big leap.

You must be willing to accept the fact that pain is a part of the process of revelation.

As you know from reading many of these Negro writers, we don't deal too much with the discussion of democracy and what it means and how improvisation fits in all that.

I also wanted to do something that I hadn't really seen in almost any black novels, which was a complex love story in which both people were extremely intelligent and talented and understood a lot of things and were still at odds getting it together.

Now the writing in the head, I definitely do every day, thinking about how I want to phrase something or how I'd like to rephrase something I've already written.

You can meet a young person who goes to school and is really enthusiastic, but if a sufficiently strong personality convinces them that this is a waste of time, that person might flunk out.

Under popular culture's obsession with a naive inclusion, everything is O.K.

The point is, you have an ethnic heritage and you have a human heritage. Your human heritage includes everything of human value.

Volumptuous women look good. Ignorant messages from mass media tell women what size to be, but female qualities-a softness, a soothing capacity that a woman has no matter what size she happens to be-sustain the more humane aspects of civilization.

What we need in America is a renaissance. We need to go forward by going backward.

People don't really think other people are the same.

The high point of civilization is that you can hate me and I can hate you but we develop an etiquette that allows us to deal with each other because if we acted solely upon our impulse we'd probably go to war.