For me, it’s about becoming a mogul, owning my own projects, and establishing myself as a funding producer. That’s what’s big to me. The movies and all that stuff are great, but the fact that I’m in a position to do what I want to do, however I want to do it and when I want to do it is bigger.

I wanted to be in a punk band before I had even heard any punk music.

For me, it’s enough that I have the first and last word.

I’ve always wanted to make a career in the arts, and I think that my only hope at doing that is to make it more about the work.

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.

O, you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you, and I would have ended my life – it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.

I am the freest author in the world.

Football (soccer) is a matter of life and death, except more important.

Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses.

Your life must be a progression towards ownership – first mentally of your independence, and then physically of your work, owning what you produce.

Where liberty is, there is my country.

Only the educated are free.

I don’t create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done.

Passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant.

I think, generally, I just cannot really envision life without writing and producing records and singing.

How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.

If you want to cut your own throat, don’t come to me for a bandage.

Music will never go away, and I will never stop making music; it’s just what capacity or what arena you decide to do it.

I’m first and foremost a writer. I followed my personal legend, my childhood dream of becoming a writer, but I can’t say why I’m one.

At the end of the day, the TV show is the best job in the world. I get to go anywhere I want, eat and drink whatever I want. As long as I just babble at the camera, other people will pay for it. It’s a gift.

After getting out of the service and going into baseball I never wanted to do anything else.

What’s real freedom? Real freedom is being able to not have my way and still be just as happy as if I did.

When everything works best, it’s not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It’s when you’re mad with it, it’s when it’s stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It’s when there’s no hope but that.

I always invest my own money in the companies that I create. I don’t believe in the whole thing of just using other people’s money. I don’t think that’s right. I’m not going to ask other people to invest in something if I’m not prepared to do so myself.

The magistrates are the ministers for the laws, the judges their interpreters, the rest of us are servants of the law, that we all may be free.

I started out as a poet. I’ve always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.

If you are born an artist, you have no choice but to fight to stay an artist.

Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor.

In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in any other country. It is also a very free society.

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.

The incomparable greatness of the religions of the East lies in their having been second to none in vibrating with the passion for unity. This note, which is essential to every form of mysticism, has even penetrated them so deeply that we find ourselves falling under a spell simply by uttering the names of their Gods.

Acting is just a way of making a living, the family is life.

When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government – that is despotism.

I’m always amazed at how many people assume a business has to lose money before it makes money.

Fighting football, not serenity football – that is what I like.

Colonies do not cease to be colonies because they are independent.

If you can build a business up big enough, it’s respectable.

If there’s one thing that’s certain in business, it’s uncertainty.

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

Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted.

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.

There is no more independence in politics than there is in jail.

To not follow your passion in life is a recipe for failure and unhappiness.

I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner: ‚This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality.‘ Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.

Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.

I was offered a job on Wall Street by my uncle. But I wanted to get out. Make-it-on-my-own kinda thing.

The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.

The album requires a certain focus of mine that I can’t really explain – let’s just say it’s all I can really do while I’m doing it.

If you do things, whether it’s acting or music or painting, do it without fear – that’s my philosophy. Because nobody can arrest you and put you in jail if you paint badly, so there’s nothing to lose.

We, we – as I say, we go in and shake up other industries and I think, you know, we do it differently and I think that industries are not quite the same as a result of Virgin attacking the market.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.

Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.

You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.

Music is in my DNA!

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty.

The only passion that guides me is for the truth… I look at everything from this point of view.

With Virgin, I’ve just loved creating things. And as a private company, I can get away with moving Virgin from records to airlines to train companies to space companies to whatever, without ever having to worry about analysts knocking the value of my stock.

We know what works. Freedom Works. We know what’s right. Freedom is right.

In South Africa, we could not have achieved our freedom and just peace without the help of people around the world, who through the use of non-violent means, such as boycotts and divestment, encouraged their governments and other corporate actors to reverse decades-long support for the Apartheid regime.

I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world.

Despotism can only exist in darkness, and there are too many lights now in the political firmament to permit it to remain anywhere, as it has heretofore done, almost everywhere.