If it’s illegal to rock and roll, throw my ass in jail!

The more you practice, the better you get, the more freedom you have to create.

Cassius Clay is a name that white people gave to my slave master. Now that I am free, that I don’t belong anymore to anyone, that I’m not a slave anymore, I gave back their white name, and I chose a beautiful African one.

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.

Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.

On the other hand, what I like my music to do to me is awaken the ghosts inside of me. Not the demons, you understand, but the ghosts.

U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don’t really know what we’re doing and when we do, it doesn’t seem to help.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people’s throats – and one always secretes too much jelly.

I believe in singing.

Life is one grand, sweet song, so start the music.

We are not actually equal – humanity – if we are not allowed to freely love one another.

Violent means will give violent freedom. That would be a menace to the world and to India herself.

We uploaded ‚Ocean Eyes‘ to SoundCloud, and it started getting a lot of plays pretty much immediately.

After one has been in prison, it is the small things that one appreciates: being able to take a walk whenever one wants, going into a shop and buying a newspaper, speaking or choosing to remain silent. The simple act of being able to control one’s person.

True liberal government is founded on the emancipation of men.

The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

I won’t be satisfied until people want to hear me sing without looking at me. Of course, that doesn’t mean I want them to stop looking.

The people will save their government, if the government itself will allow them.

I don’t see any boundaries between any of the art forms. I think they all inter-relate completely.

I used to – my earliest memory of waking up with a melody in my head was, you know, 8, 9, 10. I’ve always heard kind of melodies in my head.

Next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world.

Usually, when Nirvana made music, there wasn’t a lot of conversation. We wanted everything to be surreal. We didn’t want to have some contrived composition.

My music will go on forever. Maybe it’s a fool say that, but when me know facts me can say facts. My music will go on forever.

When the first big paycheque with ‚Dumb And Dumber‘ hit, I went: ‚Gosh, I wonder if this will affect my performance. Will I do a take and think, was that worth $7 million?‘ But that never happened. If anything, it made me rebel against that thing when people who get rich start playing it safe.

Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches – he has made music sick.

Freedom is what everyone wants – to be able to act and live with freedom. But the only way to get to a place of freedom is through discipline.

I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.

The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I’m doin‘ now, man, for more years than I know. I got it from them.

I never listen to ‚Nevermind.‘ I haven’t listened to it since we put it out. That says something.

All respect for the office of the presidency aside, I assumed that the obvious and unadulterated decline of freedom and constitutional sovereignty, not to mention the efforts to curb the power of judicial review, spoke for itself.

Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another.

People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around – the music and the ideas.

Man lives freely only by his readiness to die, if need be, at the hands of his brother, never by killing him.

Government’s first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives.

You can stroke people with words.

You know, my sister sings, my brother plays drums in my band. My whole family is a bunch of musicians.

I find that when I get on stage now, I don’t want to perform a lot of my songs because they don’t feel like me. So I want to make songs that are timeless.

I would love to continue in music, with writing… but I am not the kind of person who will hang around if I start to become irrelevant. If that happens, I will bow down gracefully, raise my kids, and have a garden. And I am going to let my hair go gray when I am older. I don’t need to be blonde when I’m 60!

Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there’s no fitting into it now.

Music is one of the most powerful things the world has to offer. No matter what race or religion or nationality or sexual orientation or gender that you are, it has the power to unite us.

My favorite record label of all time is Motown. That era of music was my favorite.

I realized the power of hip-hop. I realized how influential this music and this culture are.

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

I don’t have time to stand around and listen to an 11-minute song.

Women have to be extremely careful about choosing something that they consider an act of defiance that can really be used to further their enslavement.

Honestly, I never really put the mic down.

What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of Liberty and Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual and surest support?

How wonderful it is to be an American. We have known the best of times and the worst of times.

I’ve been in the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus since I was 8.

I’ve always appreciated a turn of phrase.

A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom.

There are really two core principles at play here. There’s giving people a voice so that people can express their opinions. Then, there’s keeping the community safe, which I think is really important. We’re not gonna let people plan violence or attack each other or do bad things.

My children came out as individuals in their own right. They were not my products. They had their own characters and were very strong-minded. I gave them a lot of freedom when they were still very young. The one thing they got from me is morals. They would never betray anyone. They are really good people.

I have to admit I’ve found myself doing the same things that a lot of other rock stars do or are forced to do. Which is not being able to respond to mail, not being able to keep up on current music, and I’m pretty much locked away a lot. The outside world is pretty foreign to me.

I don’t want to make niche-oriented music.

For some reason, I’m really comfortable talking about my personal life in songs.

Freedom does not die from frontal attack. It dies because men in power no longer believe in a system based upon liberty.

It seems almost backwards to me that my music seems the more emotional outlet, and the art stuff seems more about ideas.

‚Thursday‘ is a conceptual album. Whatever that situation was, I spent the whole album focusing on that situation.