Gil Scott-Heron Quotes
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Man is a complex being: he makes deserts bloom - and lakes die.
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Nobody can do everything, but everybody can do something.
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Schedule? I have no schedule. There is no hurry. I work when I want to.
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America .. the international Jekyll and Hyde ... the land of a thousand disguises, sneaks up on you but rarely surprises
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The first revolution is when you change your mind
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I was one of the first three black students to go to an all-white school in Tennessee.
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I think a whole lot of stuff gets by people - I could name half a dozen groups that do songs that are openly supportive of experimentation with drugs, nobody ever said anything to them.
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My songs were always about the tone of voice rather than the words.
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Colour is not the issue in America; class is.
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You see Martin Luther King is dead and Huey Newton is not. And Malcolm X is dead and Bobby Seale is not. And Vernon Jordan was shot. The thing that revolutionaries, or even people who want to claim they're revolutionaries, often forget is that it doesn't make no difference what kind of wardrobe you wear, and if you speak up about Black people doing better you just risked your life.
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I work hard at it [delivery of lyrics], just like I worked hard at getting my masters degree. It's not just something I sit down and do. You have to learn and keep learning.
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We understand what the difference is between what we understand and what the community understands about what we're doing because they have supported us long enough for me to stay out here, while other people who are doing other things have not. A lot of people have trouble pinning down what it is we do and how. But we don't have any trouble with that. As long as that's their problem, it's their problem.
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If someone comes to you and asks for help, and you can help them, you're supposed to help them. Why wouldn't you? You have been put in the position somehow to be able to help this person.
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I am honestly not sure how capable I am of love. And I'm not sure why.
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Every once in a while, you live long enough to get the respect that people didn't want to give while you were trying to become a senior citizen.
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The way you get to know yourself is by the expressions on other people's faces, because that's the only thing that you can see, unless you carry a mirror about.
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The revolution that takes place in your head, nobody will ever see that.
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I don't suspect that in many instances the artists who are dedicated in that fashion to the progress of that community are as well protected by the community as might be necessary.
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I don't think people in power have the potential to do anything like that to me. I feel as though as long as our music is available, folks are going to hear it.
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You can have a poem like "B-Movie" and sum up thirty conversations that people have had on the subject, but I wrote it down, and other people didn't.
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I was born in Chicago, but I was raised in a town called Jackson, Tennessee. And a lot of these changes that were necessary and talked about it as important have been made, like, people go to school where they want to go. They work for equal pay, they work for - they can go school and have an equal shot at a job.
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Everything that's bad for you catches on too quickly in America, because that's the easiest thing to get people to invest in, the pursuits that are easy and destructive, the ones that bring out the least positive aspects of people.
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Angel dust won't go away. Somefolks who were smoking it were going away.
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Oftentimes, the way it seems to be is that our artists in particular point themselves out as spokesmen for a certain constituency in a community, and thereby place themselves in that vulnerable position.
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You never cared enough to be Black
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All the dreams you show up in are not your own.
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The revolution will be no re-run brothers, The revolution will be live.
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I don't see any independent position that I'm in; it's rather inter-dependent.
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I learnt early on that your audience take the songs in the way they want to rather than the way you might want them too.
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If we meet somebody who has never made a mistake, lets help them start a religion. Until then, were just going to meet other humans and help to make each other better.
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