mark…

“Miles Davis got to sit in Buddy Anderson’s chair for the Eckstine band’s entire two-week stand at the Riviera—though the two weeks were more memorable to the eighteen-year-old than to anybody else. As Eckstine recalled, “Miles, you couldn’t even hear him past the reed section.”
― James Kaplan, 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool

“Though there’s simply no way to prove that no real Jesus ever existed [...], the closer you look for him the harder he is to see. When we search for what we think of as new innovations brought about by Jesus, invariably we find the same ideas have already come from some other source. He was a placeholder for all the values bestowed by all the other savior gods; he taught all the things Greek philosophers and Jewish Rabbis taught; he performed the same miracles, healings and resurrections the pagan magicians and exorcists did; in other words Jesus Christ was not a real person, but a synthesis of every cherished and passionate notion the ancient world came up with — noble truths, gentle wisdom, beloved fables, ancient attitudes, internal contradictions, scientific absurdities, intolerable attitudes and all. [...] We see indications that the first generation of Christianity began as a Jewish version of the Mystery Faiths, and that all the confused, contradictory ‘biographical’ information for Jesus stems from a deliberate allegory.”
― David Fitzgerald

“Ted Joans carried “a blackjack and a napkin filled with hot pepper to throw in their eyes in case I was attacked.” LeRoi Jones had a similar strategy”
― James Kaplan, 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool

“I mention the phrase “two plus two” intentionally. “Two plus two equals five” was a slogan used in the Soviet Union that was later famously incorporated by George Orwell in his dystopian novel”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us