Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.

Because Lincoln is so closely identified with what it is to be American, everyone wants to claim him, to rewrite his story to satisfy their own particular needs. For my own people, it was important to imagine him as the Great Emancipator, the Moses who led us out of slavery.

Lincoln would love the fact that Obama is such a great conciliator, trying to transcend ideology.

Keeping the Union together, freeing slaves and being assassinated all added up to creating 'Lincoln the myth.' He overcame a lot of his own prejudices and became what many would consider the first black man's president.

So, Mexico, Brazil, they wanted their national culture to be 'blackish' - really brown, a beautiful brown blend. And finally, I discovered that in each of these societies the people at the bottom are the darkest skinned with the most African features.

Color categories are on steroids in Latin America. I find that fascinating. It's very difficult for Americans, particularly African-Americans to understand or sympathize with.

We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community.

You can say I had a severe case of 'Roots' envy. I wanted to be like Alex Haley, and I wanted to be able to... do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage, as I like to put it, and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa.

I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy, and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age, he wanted to be an Episcopal priest, because he so admired his priest, a black man from someplace called Haiti.

I knew that there were black people in Africa, of course, unfortunately because of movies such as 'Tarzan.'

In Ethiopia, the black people became Christians 1700 years ago, hundreds of years before Northern Europe turned to Christianity... And here, most of the saints are black.

When Europeans came upon real ruined cities they refused to believe that they had been built by Africans. Here the past has been distorted and denied.

I would like to do a series about sequencing the human genome, and also analyze more human diversity among other ethnic groups - a 'Faces of America 2.'

I want to get into the educational DNA of American culture. I want 10 percent of the common culture, more or less, to be black.

I'm a tech geek. Whenever I read about something new, I think to myself, How can I take this and make it black?

What people forget is that the most radical thing about Obama is that he was the first black man in history to imagine that he could become president, who was able to make other Americans believe it as well. Other than that, he is a centrist, just like I try to be. He's been bridging divisions his whole life.

A more humane form of capitalism is about the best I think we can get. Which might sound very reformist or conservative, but that's basically where I am.

The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.

The African American's relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent, at least since the early nineteenth century, when 3,000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa.

My family and our neighbors and friends thought of Africa and its Africans as extensions of the stereotyped characters that we saw in movies and on television in films such as 'Tarzan' and in programs such as 'Ramar of the Jungle' and 'Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.'

For as long as I can remember, I have been passionately intrigued by 'Africa,' by the word itself, by its flora and fauna, its topographical diversity and grandeur; but above all else, by the sheer variety of the colors of its people, from tan and sepia to jet and ebony.

My father, if anything, first and last, was a man of words. He loved stories; he didn't live for stories, exactly, but I think he lived through stories. I think, like many writers, he loved stories about things he had experienced as much as, if not more than, he loved the experiences themselves.

My father was the funniest man I ever met. He made Redd Foxx look like an undertaker.

It's important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilized only when white people arrived. In fact, Africans had been creators of culture for thousands of years before. These were very intelligent, subtle and sophisticated people, with organized societies and great art.

The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination, by itself, would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor, while expanding opportunities for economic betterment.

Politicians will not put forth programs aimed at the problems of poor blacks while their turnout remains so low.

If you share a common ancestor with somebody, you're related to them. It doesn't mean that you're going to invite them to the family reunion, but it means that you share DNA. I think it's fascinating.

America is the greatest nation ever founded. The ideals are the greatest ever espoused in human history, and we just need the country to live up to them. But what I worry about are the 1 million black men in the prison system.

The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African-American we have ever researched.

Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but their contributions have been obscured, lost, buried.

I score everything by hand on manuscript paper and then make copies.

The great thing about a record is it frees your imagination; it gives your eyes a rest and lets your mind wander. There's the special thing that each record can mean a different thing to every person listening to it.

I've done entire scores for I don't know how many films and series. I never kept track; I suppose it's up in the hundreds.

My wife and I never squabbled in front of the children. We never touched each other except in love.

I compose the music according to the nature of the show. 'Peter Gunn's' focus was violence so that was my key.

Success is not usually easy or fast.

In times of stress, I frequently remind myself that I'm doing what I want to do most and that's what really counts.

Writing for TV or films isn't great art. You have to have a common denominator. It's up to the composer to make that common denominator memorable.

I just think the time and where I was brought up had a great deal to do in giving me the ambition to kind of get out and do something and not go into the steel mill.

You know, directors are funny people. They live with these movies for a year or more. And when you go in to score the picture, you're fooling with their child. They want to know everything that happens to the score - and why.

I had no idea 'Moon River' would do so well. I was too busy working to think about it.

Film music, over the years, has taken from everybody.

Themes on some TV shows are overdone. That 'Playhouse 90' theme music was an example.

Music has been taken over in this country by personalities and dominated by rock 'n' roll. There's been a synthesizer invasion and it's not going to go away.

You know, my career hasn't exactly been the sort of thing that usually happens to film composers, but I sure am glad it happened to me.

I read magazines and reviews. If consensus says something is good, I'll get it and see what's going on.

Writing music is very, very clinical. You just sit down at a piano, map out a theme and when all the technicalities come together, out pours the music.

When I play 'Newhart' in concert, it always gets a hand, right from the very beginning. To me, 'Newhart' is a hit.

Music forced into the air you breathe is an invasion of privacy!

If you call making people smile with 'The Pink Panther,' then I made a contribution.