There is a limit on how much information you can keep bottled up.

To me, seeing a really great comedian is a bit like watching a musician or a poet.

You know why Madison Avenue advertising has never done well in Harlem? We're the only ones who know what it means to be Brand X.

We thought I was going to be a great athlete, and we were wrong, and I thought I was going to be a great entertainer, and that wasn't it either. I'm going to be an American Citizen. First class.

You know, I always say white is not a colour, white is an attitude, and if you haven't got trillions of dollars in the bank that you don't need, you can't be white.

Being white is a job in America. You take that away, you better get the soldiers out.

I buy about $1,500 worth of papers every month. Not that I trust them. I'm looking for the crack in the fabric.

I tell people, 'If you want to send a message to the White House, call my house.'

I used to get letters saying, 'I didn't know black children and white children were the same.'

I'm not a comic. I'm a humorist.

It's cool to be healthy.

My belief is, you know, certain things have to be explained that's never been explained.

Once I realised the value of making people laugh, I got very good at it. Fast.

When I first broke through, there was only NBC, CBS and ABC, and they had news in the morning and in the evening - there wasn't no 24-hour news.

When I go through the airport and see white women walking through the airport barefooted, like athlete's feet don't exist, there's something wrong.

When I was a boy, I was taught never to use insulting expressions like, 'I've been gypped,' or, 'He welshed on the deal.'

Let me tell you, never before in the history of this planet has anybody made the progress that African-Americans have made in a 30-year period, in spite of many black folks and white folks lying to one another.

You hear entertainers all the time, saying, 'If I couldn't get paid for this, I'd do it for free.' When's the last time you ever heard a business person say, 'If I couldn't get paid for being chairman of British Petroleum, I'd do it for free'?

I never thought I'd see the day that I would see white folks as frightened, or more so, than black folks was during the civil rights movement when we was in Mississippi.

It was an unwritten law that black comics were not permitted to work white nightclubs. You could sing and you could dance, but you couldn't stand flat-footed and talk; that was a no-no.