Browsing Topic Best Folks Quotes

Those who take the most from the table, teach contentment. Those for whom the taxes are destined, demand sacrifice. Those who eat their fill, speak to the hungry, of wonderful times to come. Those who lead the country into the abyss, call ruling difficult, for ordinary folk.

On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

We were trying to transform America, not triumph over white folk.

Well everybody’s got a secret, son, something that they just can’t face. Some folks spend their whole lives trying to keep it, they carry it with them every step that they take Till some day they just cut it loose, cut it loose or let it drag ’em down Where no one asks any questions or looks too long in your face In the darkness on the edge of town.

Racism isn’t born, folks, it’s taught. I have a two-year-old son. You know what he hates? Naps! End of list.

I was sixty-six years old. I still had to make a living. I looked at my social security check of 105 dollars and decided to use that to try to franchise my chicken recipe. Folks had always liked my chicken.

I come from a line of self-motivated, determined folk – not grand, not high society, but no-nonsense, family-minded go-getters.

The two best interview subjects are children under 10 and people over 70 for the same reason: they say the first thing that comes to their mind. The children don’t know what they’re saying and the old folks don’t care.

Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have left me.

But what I would say to my successor is that it is important not just to shoot but to aim. And it is important, in this seat, to make sure that you’re making your best judgments based on data, intelligence, the information that’s coming from your commanders and folks on the ground and you’re not being swayed by politics.

You only have to start a job of work to realize how few decent, honest folk there are about.

If the churches don’t move, much of the community won’t move. We’ve got a situation in which a black church is still a major institution in the black community where 55 percent of the black folk attend and over 75 pass through its doors.

The truth is the kindest thing we can give folks in the end.

They’ll get it all from you sooner or later ’cause they own this f**kin’ place. It’s a big club and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good, honest, hard-working people: white collar, blue collar, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on.

The image of blacks usually is one of people who are suffering from hunger, unemployment, and poverty. The idea of them as agents and activists – as starting revolutions – does not exist in most people’s minds. And I think it’s very, very important that folks understand how much America was founded on the enslavement of blacks, and how the resistance of blacks to that enslavement has been the spark plug for so many important developments.

Threatened folk live long.

We don’t have enough folks who grew up in working class rural communities.

Most artists I know are private, and quiet folks who often spend most of their days alone in a studio.

For bees are captious folk / And quick to turn against the lubber’s touch.

Don’t you know sugar is brown first? White folks couldn’t stand the fact that something so sweet shared the same color as the people who cut the cane, slopped the hogs and picked the cotton. So they bleached it to resemble them, and now they done gone and fooled everybody. You included.

God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don’t know what you looking for. Trouble do it for most folks, I think. … Yeah, It. God ain’t a he or a she, but a It.

A meritocracy is a system in which the people who are the luckiest in their health and genetic endowment; luckiest in terms of family support, encouragement and, probably, income; luckiest in their educational and career opportunities; and luckiest in so many other ways difficult to enumerate – these are the folks who reap the largest rewards.

That’s just how white folks will do you. It wasn’t merely the cruelty involved; I was learning that black people could be mean and then some. It was a particular brand of arrogance, an obtuseness in otherwise sane people that brought forth our bitter laughter. It was as if whites didn’t know they were being cruel in the first place. Or at least thought you deserved of their scorn.

Folks are really tired of this rabid division between Republicans and Democrats. Folks want people to come together and solve the problems and the challenges of America.

Fleetwood Mac are more like a folk-rock band.

And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice – based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudices and muddled folk wisdom – how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right!

That applies, by the way, even to some of the folks who are now [Donald] Trump supporters. They’re responding to a fictional character named Barack Obama who they see on Fox News or who they hear about through Rush Limbaugh.

Where did we get the idea of insultin’ folks by pointin’ out their age? … It seems that we think youth is some special accomplishment brought about by the individual himself!

I play these [folk acoustic] concerts and I ask myself, ‘Would you come see me tonight?’ – and I’d have to answer truthfully, ‘No, I wouldn’t come. I’d rather be doin’ something else, really I would. That something else is rock… The words are pictures, and the rock’s gonna help me flesh out the colors of the pictures. (1965)

So just to be clear, I’m not going to sign any package that somehow prevents the top rate from going up for folks at the top 2 percent.

People sing each other’s songs and they cultivate standards. That’s the reason why we have folk music and folk stories. History is told through song.

We’re supposed to forget whatever happened in the past because 9/11 is where history begins. Okay, since 2001, how many wars have been started, how many countries have been destroyed? So now ISIS is the new evil – but how did that evil begin? Is it more evil to do what ISIS is doing, which is to go around massacring people – mainly, but not only, Shi’a – slitting throats? By the way, the US-backed militias are doing similar things, except they don’t show beheadings of white folks on TV.

The place is changed now, and many familiar faces are gone, but the greatest change is myself. I was a child then, I had no idea what the world would be like. I wished to trust myself on the waters and the sea. Everything was romantic in my imagination. The woods were peopled by the mysterious good folk. The Lords and Ladies of the last century walked with me along the overgrown paths, and picked the old fashioned flowers among the box and rose hedges of the garden.

I think the American people have a generous instinct. They understand that we’re a nation of immigrants. But if those folks are going to live in this country, they have to be put on a pathway to citizenship that involves them paying a fine, making sure that they are at the back of the line and not cutting in front of people who applied legally to come into the country.

I didn’t become a Christian until many years later, when I moved to the South Side of Chicago after college. It happened not because of indoctrination or a sudden revelation, but because I spent month after month working with church folks who simply wanted to help neighbors who were down on their luck no matter what they looked like, or where they came from, or who they prayed to. It was on those streets, in those neighborhoods, that I first heard God’s spirit beckon me. It was there that I felt called to a higher purpose – His purpose.