A Few Favorite Quotes

Es­ti­mated reading time is 2 min­utes.

HERE ARE A FEW STATE­MENTS that I fan­cied when I read them. I orig­i­nally placed them in the sidebar on the home­page of this site but in 2022, side­bars are no longer hip. In fact, most on­line ex­perts about things on­line sug­gest doing away with side­bars com­pletely! Me, I like side­bars but I com­pro­mised with the pros by dras­ti­cally re­ducing the length of mine. 

But not wanting to simply delete the quotes that I had col­lected, I moved them here. They’re in no order and they cer­tainly don’t make some kind of co­he­sive state­ment. So it goes . . .

 

____________

 

[Elvis] came to the ses­sion, picked the songs, and if some­thing in the arrange­ment was changed, he was the one to change it. Every­thing was worked out spon­ta­neously. Nothing was re­ally re­hearsed. Con­sciously or un­con­sciously, everyone im­i­tated him.”

– Bones Howe

 

You have no idea how great he is, re­ally you don’t. You have no com­pre­hen­sion, it’s ab­solutely im­pos­sible. I can’t tell you why he’s so great, but he is. He’s sensational.”

– Phil Spector

 

“I don’t think he ripped them off. I think once some­thing has been ex­posed, anyone can add or take from it if they like. He was just so great, so pop­ular, and so hot, and so any­thing that he played be­came a hit.”

– B.B. King

 

He was an in­te­grator. Elvis was a blessing. They wouldn’t let black music through. He opened the door for black music.”

– Little Richard

 

“Elvis was a great man and did more for civil rights than people know. To say he was a racist is an in­sult to us all.”

– Ernest Withers

 

“The only white boy that had soul—who could sing as good as any of them—was Elvis When it comes to singing, no­body had every­thing like Elvis. I’ll tell the world, Elvis was the greatest of all time.”

– Muhammad Ali

 

The first time that I ap­peared on stage, I re­ally didn’t know what all the yelling was about. I didn’t re­alize that my body was moving. It’s a nat­ural thing to me. So to the man­ager back­stage I said, ‘What’d I do?’ And he said, ‘What­ever it is, go back and do it again.’ ”

– Elvis Presley

 

“Elvis is the greatest cul­tural force in the 20th cen­tury. He in­tro­duced the beat to every­thing, music, lan­guage, clothes, it’s a whole new so­cial rev­o­lu­tion [and] the ’60s come from it.”

– Leonard Bernstein

 

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble—it’s what you know that just ain’t so.”

– Mark Twain

 

“I have lived with sev­eral Zen mas­ters, all of them cats.”

– Eck­hart Tolle

 

RandomDrawing orange 1200

The piece above was drawn “ran­domly” by a con­trap­tion ex­plained in “Draw Ab­stract Art with a Random Number Gen­er­ator” by Larry Cotton for the Makezine web­site. It has nothing to do with any of the quotes that pre­cede it—I just like it.