Melvin Van Peebles Quotes

My history was the Western. I grew up with the Lone Ranger, the Cisco Kid and Bonanza. I felt as much a child of the West as someone born in Montana or Wyoming.

I grew up in southeastern Oklahoma on a working cattle ranch, and it was always very romantic to me: The West, the cowboy, the Western way of life.

I think it's time that we have a women's show about the West. The concentration has been on the men and the Indians.

I'm very attracted to the great open spaces of the West.

I've always been interested in the history of the West, our country and particularly as it relates to the Native Americans - the original Americans.

When we think of the myth of the settling of the West, this is our creation myth. But because we think of it as mythology, not as real people interacting with other real people, we ignore the cost of human lives and blood.

In a typical history book, black Americans are mentioned in the context of slavery or civil rights. There's so much more to the story.

The word 'western' usually refers to movies, of course, but there is a literary tradition of the same name that pre-dates the moving picture and retains its vitality yet.

It was because of my great interest in the West, and my belief that its development would be assisted by the interest I could awaken in others, that I decided to bring the West to the East through the medium of the Wild West Show.

But the West did not last long enough. Its folk myths and heroes became stage properties of Hollywood before the poets had begun to get to work on them.

The West is the most powerful reality in the history of this country. It's always had a power, a presence, an attraction that differentiated it from the rest of the United States.

The West is the most American part of America....

When people think of the West, it's easy to envision wagon trains, Buffalo Bill, the glory days of the Gold Rush. Cowboy hats come to mind.

When I was a kid, everyone wanted to be cowboys and Indians.

Foreman had annihilated every single one of his opponents to that point, but here was Ali, going to Africa, selling himself as the 'real deal' black man.

There were people who voted for Obama simply because he was the first African-American. We had a lot of people that would not have voted for Obama but who did because they really hoped that the nation, making the statement electing an African-American president, would prove once and for all that this is not a racist nation. I believe that there were all kinds of people that voted for Obama with that hope. That was the reason. Everything else was irrelevant to them.

I grew up in that, when I was a kid. My friends and I used to play cowboys and Indians. We were cowboys killing the Indians, following the Wild West stories. All of this combined into a very strange culture, which is frightened.

Once in a while you get people that maybe because of economic reasons, or have a social network, they get attracted. But it's a very tiny percent so that when we look at, you know, who are pastors and who are the head clergy of these congregations, they're overwhelmingly white, just a few African Americans, and those folks are usually called to what were formerly white congregations, or they started interracial church from the get-go.

[According to Twitter] 24 percent of American Twitter users are African-American. That's about twice as high as African-Americans are represented in the population.

I've always thought of myself as an African-American comedian, African-American man, everything.

Blaxploitation films were black films targeting black people. They were films made to appeal to a culture in a way that was supposed to be unfiltered.

I feel like a real cowboy! Yippi Ki Yay!

Michael Jackson fundamentally altered the terms of the debate about African American music.

The fire. The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dante's paradise could equal it. One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West. Long may it burn.