LOUIS ARMSTRONG

There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them.

We all do 'do, re, mi,' but you have got to find the other notes yourself.

All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song.

What we play is life.

The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician.

You blows who you is.

Musicians don't retire; they stop when there's no more music in them.

If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.

There is two kinds of music, the good, and the bad. I play the good kind.

If you decide to walk into the schools with the little colored kids, take me along, Daddy. God bless you.

President Eisenhower is two faced and has no guts.

It’s getting almost so bad a colored man hasn’t got any country…. The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to Hell!

I don’t get involved in politics. I just blow my horn.

We never did try to get together and to show the younger Negroes such as myself, to try and even to show that he has ambitions - and with just a little encouragement, I could have really done something worthwhile. But instead, we did nothing but let the young upstarts know that they were young and simple, and that was that.

When the other kids started calling me nicknames, I knew everything was all right. I have a pretty big mouth, so they hit on that and began calling me Gatemouth or Satchelmouth, and that Satchelmouth has stuck to me all my life, except that now it's been made into 'Satchmo' - 'Satchmo' Armstrong.

I never want to be anything more than I am; what I don't have, I don't need.

When this ugly gangster told Joe Glaser that he must take the name of Armstrong down, off of the marquee, and it was an 'order from Al Capone,' Mr. Glaser looked this cat straight in the face and told him these words: 'I think that Louis Armstrong is the world's greatest, and this is my place, and I defy anybody to take his name down from there.'

When I play, maybe 'Back o' Town Blues,' I'm thinking about one of the old, low-down moments - when maybe your woman didn't treat you right. That's a hell of a moment when a woman tell you, 'I got another mule in my stall.'

I warm up at home. I hit the stage, I'm ready, whether it's rehearsal or anything.

I like kissable lips. A woman's lips must say, 'Come here and kiss me, Pops.'

I do believe that my whole success goes back to that time I was arrested as a wayward boy at the age of thirteen. Because then I had to quit running around and began to learn something. Most of all, I began to learn music.

I gathered that those two Big-shot Boys, Joe + Fletcher, just was afraid to let me sing, thinking maybe I'd sort of ruin their reputations with their musical public. They not knowing that I had been singing all of my life. In churches, etc. I had one of the finest All Boys Quartets that ever walked the streets of New Orleans.

Very few of the men whose names have become great in the early pioneering of jazz and of swing were trained in music at all. They were born musicians: they felt their music and played by ear and memory. That was the way it was with the great Dixieland Five.

The first time I heard Jack Teagarden on the trombone, I had goose pimples all over.

'Cat?' 'Cat' can be anybody from the guy in the gutter to a lawyer, doctor, the biggest man to the lowest man, but if he's in there with a good heart and enjoy the same music together, he's a cat.