Oliver Sacks Quotes

Music can be a distraction and an escape. Sometimes a welcome escape. You need it. But music can also serve a very important social function because music can do things that mere prose, mere ordinary political agitation can't do.

It's easy for me to care about Toronto, because Toronto is a community that cares about itself. It represents the world. It talks to itself, and because it does, it figures out that there must be a music garden as part of its existence.

The arts can play a vital role in revitalizing neighborhoods, using and improving vacant space, bringing new jobs and new sense of opportunity, and improving public safety by generating more foot traffic and more eyes on the street.

Music is a social act.

I would like to use architecture to create bonds between people who live in cities, and even use it to recover the communities that used to exist in every single city.

In Africa, music is for everything, Music was originally used for community. That was what music was for.

We want to bring the kids, the parents, the grandparents and grandkids together, we want them to have a shared viewing experience. We want the kids to talk about it in the playground, dad to talk about it down the pub, grandma to talk about it while she's out shopping.

Something that I think extends to a lot of African cultures is that the line between performer and audience is blurry. My mom would lead the wedding song regularly, and she isn't a professional singer. Even as an audience member, you're expected to clap and sing the response to the lead.

Music and dance have also always been a communal activity, something that everyone participated in. The thought of a musical concert in which a class of professionals performed for a quiet audience was virtually unknown throughout our species' history.

Baseball exemplifies a tension in the American mind, the constant pull between our atomistic individualism and our yearning for community.

If people stand in a circle long enough, they'll eventually begin to dance.

I think of art as a glue, a cultural and social glue. It's one of the means that has served to show us the things we believe in and the things we celebrate; it has served to reinforce our relationship to each other.

What is miraculous about the past is that we have succeeded--God knows how--in making thousands and millions of individual human beings, lock well enought into one another to give us what looks like a common past, a shared story.

I am all for cultural diversity and would be willing to see each recognizable group value its cultural heritage. I am a New York patriot, for instance, and if I lived in Los Angeles, I would love to get together with other New York expatriates and sing "Give My Regards to Broadway".

One of the other experts we consulted with, this guy named Dacher Keltner, he was big on sadness as community bonding - I think is the word he used.

Dancing is the only activity in which almost all ages and both sexes participate.

No society can function as a society, unless it gives the individual member social status and function, and unless the decisive social power is legitimate.

Music doesn't have to be your livelihood to make your 'hood lively.

The emotional element which gives an obsessive value to communal existence is death.

I kept my culture. I kept the music of my roots. Through my music I became this voice and image of Africa and the people without even realising.

Either we stay at home and become pillars of the community or we go out and tour. We couldn't really find any communities that still needed pillars.

I made money. I wanted to give it back to Africa but I wanted to give it back in a meaningful way. So I really want to do something which deals with the root of the problem of hunger, of disease, of ills we have in our society.

There is a growing sense in America that being disconnected is not good. And there's also some people that are staying in their silos and not coming out, but we have to pull them out, and we have to pull ourselves together at some point, I think.

Well hip hop is basically the whole culture of the movement. There's the rap which is a form of hip hop culture. It could be breakdancing, freestyle dancing or whatever type of dancing that's happening now in the Black, Hispanic and White community.

The Deadheads are doing the dance of life and this I would say is the answer to the atom bomb.