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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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"I was born in Europe... and I've traveled all over the world. I can tell you that there is no place, no country, that is more compassionate, more generous, more accepting, and more welcoming than the United States of America."
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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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"I think historically America has been pretty tolerant. It seems when there's a mass influx from one place, that's when it becomes problematic for Americans."
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"America's best buy is a telephone call to the right man."
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"It was a mystery to me, how the tuning was, or the style seemed to come out of nowhere, it obviously had roots in America going way back, there was nothing like it for me I'd ever seen before."
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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 organized Sweet Honey In The Rock in 1973. The music was sanity and balance."
Music


"I was at the Smithsonian for twenty years, and I'm still at the Smithsonian as a curator emeritus, and I still plan to figure out what that means for me at this point in my life."
Life


"It makes sense that whatever the topic is, it's more compelling if you can provide the audience with a range of perspectives, and you can cross disciplines. And you don't have to control what people take out of it."
People


"I went to a church where you could not sing out loud in the service until you had been saved."
Church


"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


"In fact when Sweet Honey was ten years old it was too big for me to run, and I knew it, but I ran it for another thirteen years because I couldn't convince other people to really do it. And this year, I'm not running it."
People


"One of the biggest things I understood in a program like that was that it allowed more young African American scholars to do field research in the Caribbean and in Africa than had ever happened before in the history of the country and since."
History


"There is nowhere you can go and only be with people who are like you. Give it up."
People


"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
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