[On his murdered son, Ennis}: "He was my hero." "The problem is that your daughter has given her heart to a 15-year-old boy, and a 15-year-old boy does not yet qualify as a human being." "It's the little things that count when you're a daddy. Like taking your little girl for ice cream. First, you have to teach her about the concept of gravity. I can't tell you how many ice creams I've had to pick up off the floor, rinse off, and stick back on my kid's cone. Now that may sound strange, but have you bought ice cream lately? Good gosh, it's up to seventy-five cents a scoop. A scoop! What's in it, gold?" "Gray hair is God's graffiti." "The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague." "A word to the wise ain't necessary -- it's the stupid ones who need the advice." "Don't worry about senility--when it hits you, you won't know it." "Human beings are the only creatures that allow their children to come home." "I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is to try to please everyone." On the failure of his experimental educational/variety show, "Cos," 1976: "My first series ["I Spy"] ran three years, my second ["The Bill Cosby Show"] ran two years, and my third ["The New Bill Cosby Show"] ran one. This show, if I'm lucky, will run the thirteen weeks we contracted for." "My mother and father ate oink. And they loved oink grease. Lard is what they ate. And they soaked up grease with a biscuit. And they loved butter too. And they sopped up and drank and ate grease. Sausage. Bacon. Ham. They loved it. Fatback. Salt pork. Oink. And I was born with lard all on my head, in the cracks of my arms and the back of my leg. So now my cholesterol is 741. So what? It doesn't bother me that it's 741. You eat what I eat, it's supposed to be. Every once in awhile my left arm will go numb. Okay. But if you shake it, it'll go away." "Because of my father, I thought my name was Jesus Christ. My brother Russell thought that his name was Dammit." [speaking in Washington, DC, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling that eradicated segregated schooling in America] "These people marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education, and now we've got these knuckleheads walking around. The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal. These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids--$500 sneakers for what? I can't even talk the way these people talk, 'Why you ain't,' 'Where you is?' You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth!" "Kids will spend $500 on sneakers but won't spend $200 on 'Hooked-on-Phonics.'" [On The Cosby Show]: "I wanted to give the house back to the parents." "No parent must ever say, 'Get the kids out of here, I'm trying to watch TV.' The father who does start saying this is likely to see one of his children on the 6:00 News." [commenting that many young actors don't give their parents proper credit] "I'm still waiting for some actor to win, say, an Oscar...and deliver the following acceptance speech: 'I would like to thank my parents, first of all, for letting me live.'" "What best defines a child is the total inability to receive information from anything not plugged in." "If you're a parent, the five worst words you can say to your children are: 'When I was your age.' You were NEVER their age. You were older in the womb." "I can tell you, from experience, that whoever said 'Children and fools cannot lie' was one or the other himself. There's only one way to guarantee that your children are telling the truth: Limit your questions to the names of their schools." On Detroit's large poverty status: "When I come back and come back and come back I'm making a statement that this is for real. You're about to listen, absorb and to challenge yourself to move in a positive direction. Strength, that's what we're after."