“My mother was the sweetest lady who ever lived on this planet, but if you tried to tell her that Jesus wasn't a Christian, she would stomp you to death.”
“My belief is, you know, certain things have to be explained that's never been explained.”
“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.”
“Once I realised the value of making people laugh, I got very good at it. Fast.”
“I used to get letters saying, 'I didn't know black children and white children were the same.'”
“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.”
“I tell people, 'If you want to send a message to the White House, call my house.'”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”