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"The Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, actually, was an effort to put something on the mall in Washington so American tourists could walk through America, and in their minds everything on the mall would be American."
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"America is becoming so educated that ignorance will be a novelty. I will belong to the select few."
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"America is a nation that conceives many odd inventions for getting somewhere but it can think of nothing to do once it gets there."
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"In America you need a bodyguard to go out."
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"America's best buy is a telephone call to the right man."
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"There's something almost adolescent about Whitman's paean to everything that was and remains good about America."
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"I apologize to coalition forces and all the families, detainees, the families, America and all the soldiers."
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"To be black and an intellectual in America is to live in a box. On the box is a label, not of my own choosing."
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"I went to America on holiday when I was 17 and, before I knew it, I'd been signed up by an agency and had these obligations I didn't understand, but which I couldn't say no to. This industry chose me. But I did choose to make it fulfilling."
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"Watching the scenes out of New Orleans, if you turn down the sound it could be the Sudan or any Third World country. But it's not. it's the United States of America."
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"Even in political considerations, now-a-days, you have stronger motives to feel interested in the fate of Europe than in the fate of the Central or Southern parts of America."
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"I organized Sweet Honey In The Rock in 1973. The music was sanity and balance."
Music


"Well, the first time I ran into the term religion, people were asking whether you had any. You know, some people had religion and some people didn't have religion."
Religion


"I started graduate school in 1971, I started working at the Smithsonian in the festival in 1972. I went full-time at the Smithsonian in 1974. And I got my doctorate in 1975."
School


"And I used to think that proof that I had religion was whether I knew how to sing all of the songs."
Religion


"I came out of the Civil Rights Movement, and I had a different kind of focus than most people who have just the academic background as their primary training experience."
Experience


"The first job I had with the Smithsonian was as a field researcher among African American communities in Southwest Louisiana and Arkansas for the festival."
African


"When I started graduate school I was interested in the culture of the Civil Rights Movement."
Civil rights


"At the same time all this was happening, there was a folk song revival movement goingon, so the commercial music industry was actually changed by the Civil Rights Movement."
Music


"Most people come out of their Ph.D. experience trying to prove themselves, trying to get ahead, trying to get published. You're scared everybody else is going to do your research and get your topic."
Experience


"Personally I discovered that you could go through the academy as a young scholar, come out, and almost immediately have an impact on the academic environment."
Environment
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