Religion has caused more misery to all of mankind in every stage of human history than any other single idea.

Music can be healing and with my history and my knowledge of both sides of what looks like a gigantic divide in the world I feel I can point a way forward to our common humanity again.

There's something quite exciting when you have a history with somebody and you see them do new and different things.

That's all a man can hope for during his lifetime - to set an example - and when he is dead to be an inspiration for history.

In a sense words are encyclopedias of ignorance because they freeze perceptions at one moment in history and then insist we continue to use these frozen perceptions when we should be doing better.

Black people don't have an accurate idea of their history which has been either suppressed or distorted.

A man acquainted with history may in some respect be said to have lived from the beginning of the world and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.

You can't fake this music. You might be a great singer or a great musician but in the need that's got nothing to do with it. It's how you connect to the songs and to the history behind them.

You look at the greatest villains in human history the fascists the autocrats they all wanted people to kneel before them because they don't love themselves enough.

The Carter Center has the only existing international taskforce on disease eradication. Which means a total elimination of a disease on the face of the Earth. In the history of the world there's only been one disease eradicated: smallpox. The second disease I think is gonna be guinea worm.