Innovation can only occur where you can breathe free.

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.

There’s not some idea I’m going to create a work that’s going to change everybody’s consciousness.

I’m not sure if it’s good to have freedom or not. I’m really confused now.

My first phone was two tin cans tied together with string, and it worked pretty good.

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

To love one that is great, is almost to be great one’s self.

Software constraints are only confining if you use them for what they’re intended to be used for.

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.

It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.

I think that technology is always invented for historical reasons, to solve a historical problem. But they very soon reveal themselves to be capable of doing things that aren’t historical that nobody had ever thought of doing before.

In business, success often depends upon the relative age of your ideas.

I’m an inventor.

Fashion is inspired by youth and nostalgia and draws inspiration from the best of the past.

By the mid-’60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

I think it is perfectly natural for any artist to admire intensely and love a young man. It is an incident in the life of almost every artist.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film – whether it’s history, psychology, economics, or architecture – so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn’t going to help you unless you have something to say.

It is a quality of revolutions not to go by old lines or old laws, but to break up both and make new ones.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward, and freedom will be defended.

In America today, we are nearer a final triumph over poverty than is any other land.

There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn’t bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.

Governments will always play a huge part in solving big problems. They set public policy and are uniquely able to provide the resources to make sure solutions reach everyone who needs them. They also fund basic research, which is a crucial component of the innovation that improves life for everyone.

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

He does not seem to me to be a free man who does not sometimes do nothing.

I can’t make a song for a particular person or demographic. If I love it, I’m gonna do it. I have to perform it for the rest of my life. A song is like a tattoo – you can never get away from it.

In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats – maybe it’s imperative that we encounter the defeats – but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike.

All government, of course, is against liberty.

I don’t know that much about who directs what movies, but I’m definitely inspired by the look of old movies; I find them to be really beautiful.

I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it.

If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.

The doors of wisdom are never shut.

Everybody thinks that when new technologies come along that they’re transparent and you can just do your job well on it. But technologies always import a whole new set of values with them.

I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.

I’m not a very creative person, you know? I’m not really an art person. I’m not a great reader or writer or artist or musician.

Sports are basically our way of feeling sorry for ourselves. Most men can’t become athletes. We’re watching guys who actually made it. We see them dunking and making touchdowns. Then we think about ourselves when we were younger.

People always say when they meet me that I’m not what they expect. I assume they think I’m this super dark and depressing guy, but I like to channel all of those emotions into my work.

The fifth freedom is freedom from ignorance.

I didn’t have nothin‘ going for me… school, home… until I found something I loved, which was music, and that changed everything.

Tesla is becoming a real car company.

Everything is my demon muse. I have a muse which whispers in my ear and says, ‚Do this, do that,‘ but it’s my demon who provokes me.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

I find only freedom in the realms of eccentricity.

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

I wish I could say to all those people who consider themselves anarchists or radicals: Please join the nonviolent movement. This is how Gandhi freed India. If Gandhi freed India, we can certainly free the United States from our racism, misogyny, and bigotry.

If virtue promises happiness, prosperity and peace, then progress in virtue is progress in each of these for to whatever point the perfection of anything brings us, progress is always an approach toward it.

I made all my generals out of mud.

The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual. That is why the revolutionary spiritual movements that declare all former things worthless are in the right, for nothing has yet happened.

I never see what has been done; I only see what remains to be done.

It would be great to be 105 and still making films.

The United States has to move very fast to even stand still.

The belief that the world is getting worse, that we can’t solve extreme poverty and disease, isn’t just mistaken. It is harmful.

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

You should treat a muse like a fairy.

In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.

The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

There are 309 million people out there that are trying to improve their lot in life. And we’ve got a system that allows them to do it.