B. B. King

And as long as people have problems, the blues can never die.

When I sing, I play in my mind; the minute I stop singing orally, I start to sing by playing Lucille.

Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy’s playing blues like we play, he’s in high school. When he starts playing jazz it’s like going on to college, to a school of higher learning.

I don’t like anybody to be angry with me. I’d rather have friends.

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!

I was a regular hand when I was 7. I picked cotton. I drove tractors. Children grew up not thinking that this is what they must do. We thought this was the thing to do to help your family.

If you go back far enough, [socialism] meant basically control of production by producers, elimination of wage labor, democratization of all spheres of life; production, commerce, education, media, workers’ control in factories, community control of communities, and so on.

We’re going to build a wall and Mexico is going to pay. And the reason they’re going to pay and the way they’re going to pay, Bob, is this. We have a trade deficit now with Mexico of $58 billion a year. The wall is going to cost $10 billion a year. That’s what it’s going to cost. It’s going to be a powerful wall. It’s going to cost $10 billion.

The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.

We can realise a lasting peace and transform the East-West relationship to one of enduring co-operation.

So, sit down strikes in the 1930’s, organization of women’s consciousness-raising groups in the ’60’s and ’70’s, anti-war activism. I mean, all of these things work. They have to be done of course. They don’t happen by themselves.

The new nationality law declares Israel to be the nation-state of the Jewish people, downgrades the status of Arabic and formally authorizes Jewish-only communities….What is new is primarily the elevation of these racist principles to the Basic Law – constitutional status.

Both prisons and inner-city schools target a kind of superfluous population that there’s no point educating because there’s nothing for them to do. Because we’re a civilized people, we put them in prison, rather than sending death squads out to murder them.

Going to war creates a legacy of bitterness and problems, let us be a force for change in the world, a force for humanity in the world, a force for peace in the world, and a force that recognizes we can not go on like this, with grotesque levels of global inequality, grotesque threats to our environment all around the world, without the rich and powerful governments stepping up to the plate to make sure our world becomes safer and better — and those people don’t end up in poverty, in refugee camps, wasting their lives away.

The substance of the eminent Socialist gentlemen’s speech is that making a profit is a sin. It is my belief that the real sin is taking a loss!

Amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatans.

Any people has a right to self-determination, and now in Europe the process of diluting national sovereignty in the framework of a united Europe is more accepted.

Germany is the place where when Hitler was the prime minister and supreme commander, he burned over six million Jews. This is because Hitler and all German people knew that Israelis are not people who are working in the interest of the world and that is why they burned the Israelis alive with gas in the soil of Germany.

We can win an awful lot of people into the political spectrum, by offering something that is … radical.

The big transnationals want to reduce freedom by undermining the democratic functioning of the states in which they’re based, while at the same time ensuring the government will be powerful enough to protect and support them.

The world is changed by idealists.