Born on September 12th

"When I saw corruption, I was forced to find truth on my own. I couldn't swallow the hypocrisy."

"I've always loved War's Low Rider and Sly Stone's Thank You, and I just wanted to put my take on them."

"Disco deserved a better name, a beautiful name because it was a beautiful art form. It made the consumer beautiful. The consumer was the star."

"Mama tried to save us from the streets, but the streets were too strong."

"I quit high school on my birthday. It was my senior year and I didn't see the point. This was 1962, and I was ready to make music."

"I don't know if it's my music, my lyrics, my sound, and knowing the music business the way I do-all I can say is, my career has lasted way longer than I expected."

"When I commit, I commit with my whole heart, my whole being. I know the Bible like the back of my hand."

"One preacher turned me on, another turned me off."

"The whole system of society tells you what to do."

"I try to tell a story musically in a song."

"There's people making babies to my music. That's nice."

"Elton John's opinion turned the label's opinion around, all in a day."

"We were ready to launch Barry White, but the record company wouldn't put it out. Said it wouldn't sell."

"I went to jail at 16 for stealing tires off Cadillacs. When I got out I said, Never again."

"The cops picked me up for attempted murder. I can still see the detectives, licking their chops. Thought they had me. Two weeks later, the cat came out of a coma and told the truth. I was innocent."

"No one could understand the bond between me and my brother. I struggled to understand the forces that drove his soul in one direction and mine in another."

"We forget that this music, music made by my brothers and sisters, is still a baby. It's just beginning. When I think of the possibilities, it makes me smile."

"As a boy, I believed freedom for America meant freedom for me. There was a time I believed every word spoken."

"I kept my babies fed. I could have dumped them, but I didn't. I decided that whatever trip I was on, they were going with me. You're looking at a real daddy."

"I'll come to you with gifts of knowledge, wisdom and truth."

"I'm very happy with this new record. It's dealing with different aspects of love-it's me making a statement about people doing something with their lives. It is about caring for others."

"Most families had four, five brothers. But because it was just me and Darryl, we had to be twice as strong."

"People are always looking for me to be a freak, weird."

"The very fact that women now form about one-fifth of the employes in manufacture and commerce in this country has opened a vast field of industrial legislation directly affecting women as wage-earners."

"In order to be rated as good as a good man in the field of her earnings, she must show herself better than he. She must be more steady, or more trustworthy, or more skilled, or more cheap in order to have the same chance of employment."

"This position is untenable, and there can be no pause in the agitation for full political power and responsibility until these are granted to all the women of the nation."

"The workingmen have perceived that women are in the field of industry to stay; and they see, too, that there can not be two standards of work and wages for any trade without constant menace to the higher standard."

"It is fatal for any body of workers to have forever hanging from the fringes of its skirts other bodies on a level just below its own; for that means continual pressure downward, additional difficulty to be overcome in the struggle to maintain reasonable rates of wages."

"Their effort to place the women upon the same industrial level with themselves in order that all may pull together in the effort to maintain reasonable conditions of life."

"On the one hand, she is cut off from the protection awarded to her sisters abroad; on the other, she has no such power to defend her interests at the polls, as is the heritage of her brothers at home."