A Quote by Muhammad Ali

Boxing is a stepping stone just to introduce me to the audience. If I was still in Louisville, Kentucky and never was a boxer I still might get killed next week in some kind of freedom struggle and you'd ever hear the news.
I don't get into these petty things, Kentucky-Louisville. To me, it's nonsense... There will be people at Kentucky that will have a nervous breakdown if they lose to us... They've got to put the fences up on bridges. There will be people consumed by Louisville.
... That would be like stepping in front of a moving train and saying, 'Hey, honey, come stand next to me.'" I hopped off the wall and stood next to him. "Anytime." He just looked at me. "I've never killed a train before. It might be fun to try.
I'm from Louisville, Kentucky, and nobody gets out of there. So I'm like, how am I gonna get out of there? Nobody else can. So it took some time. The struggle made me realize I didn't really want to be 'normal' anymore.
What television has done is it's given me a stepping stone to get to some other countries and really wild destinations throughout this world, which perhaps I would have had to struggle to get to.
I was a really good youth boxer, and I enjoyed the sport very much. Once I actually started to play the trumpet, it is very similar to boxing. Most of the great trumpet players boxed: Miles Davis was a boxer, Wallace Roney is a boxer, Terrence Blanchard is a boxer. In a boxing ring, no one can help you. It's just you and the other guy, and your job is to get him out of there, to outscore him in the best sense of it. When you learn to box, the first thing they teach you is to protect yourself at all times, and some people also learn that they like being hit.
My wife made me watch this documentary about the Iraq War, and there was a really powerful moment where they followed some civilian whose family had been killed. This was 5 or 10 minutes of this woman talking, and it was extremely arresting. You realize how you never hear from the person on the receiving end of a war without a reporter stepping in to compartmentalize the story. Usually they're just a few shots at the end of a news report, wailing and screaming at a funeral.
A boxer should quit at the top, as they say. But that?s complicated. There are plenty of people in boxing who make money out off you. And they tell you that you?ve still got it, that it?s still getting better.
The weakness of cable news is that it chases its audience around. Your audience wants fast-paced, popular news. It needs real news. Cable news changes its stripes based on audience reaction. Viewers are reacting well to breaking news? You probably do more breaking news than you need to. The struggle is building something so that people will come to you, as opposed to constantly changing what you are because you're unsure of where the audience is.
It was a scary decision to let cameras into my life, but if I was going to do it, I just wanted to be really honest and kind of introduce myself as an adult. I think the world met me as a young girl, and they still associate me with who I was when I was 13, they still don't understand how over the last eight years what has happened and who I've become.
Goodie Mob is my passion, the core of me, the fight, the struggle. I'm still as much of an underdog as I ever was, and my music is still as anti-establishment as it ever was. I want to satisfy that rebel side. It's not null and void. I'm a whole being, and I'm just coming back full circle.
Even if I'm doing a show and there's five people in the audience and the sound system is terrible - I mean, it's been a while but I've certainly done those kind of shows where it's just every conceivable thing is against you - you still have music. It's still something that's real whether there's five people in the audience or a hundred thousand people in the audience. And that's always been there for me.
Although boxing is a sport, it's still entertainment. You've still got the fear, press conferences, the stare-downs. It's all an act in some ways. My whole life I've been doing it. I love this side of boxing - as much as the actual fight.
I'm still trying to make it. I'm still trying to get this over and do it and hopefully leave some kind of a mark on the course of American music, particularly in the tradition of what you might call the singer-songwriter.
I've always been a generous and a kind person and so on, but never, ever have I experienced that kind of love. The world just looked different to me and still does.
Everything in the media is fleeting. Don't get the wrong idea. Fame is when you're still the hot topic next week or even the week after.
Only once in a thousand years or so do we get to hear a Mozart or see a Picasso or read a Shakespeare. Ali was one of them, and yet at his heart, he was still a kid from Louisville who ran with the gods and walked with the crippled and smiled at the foolishness of it all.
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