Music is always a commentary on society.

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.

People should just buy a CD and rip it. You are legal then.

Philosophy is the highest music.

You notice how liberals keep saying, ‚If only Islam would have a Reformation‘ – it can’t have one. It says it can’t. It’s extremely dangerous in that way.

I want to be a recording artist for my whole entire life. But Broadway is something I would come back to at any given moment. I love, love, love doing theater.

I think ‚Invisible‘ is a great song, but I don’t know how accessible it is.

I guess you could say I devoted myself so strongly to my music that for awhile I forgot about my family. But I only get one set of parents, and I think I forgot about that for a little while.

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

Every single one of the guys that I’ve written songs about has been tracked down on MySpace by my fans.

Making music is like shopping for me. Every song is like a new pair of shoes.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

Even if my songs are quite sad or quite dark, I don’t want my songs to make people sad. It’s very important for me that all my songs have some kind of hope or light.

Once music ceases to be ephemeral – always disappearing – and becomes instead material… it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.

Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will.

I’ve never written a political song. Songs can’t save the world. I’ve gone through all that.

I can understand how some people might resent me for having the audacity to continue playing music, but it’d take a lot more than that to stop me from doing it. I started Foo Fighters because I didn’t want to retreat.

In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.

No one sells a song better than the person that wrote it.

You gotta make sure the listener is listening to you, so if you put it into a song, often times, if the song is striking enough, then you can really deliver the story most effectively while keeping the ear of the listener the whole time.

Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

I love the Sex Pistols. I’m a big Beach Boys fan and a huge Zeppelin and Queen fan.

I have observed that society in general always seems to honor its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.

What I’ve discovered is that in art, as in music, there’s a lot of truth-and then there’s a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It’s the moment that the audience falls in love.

Hawaii is paradise. It sounds cheesy to say it, but there’s music in the air there.

I think that society has to be careful not to shift all of its resources to the elderly versus the young.

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

To all the musicians who are making reggaeton, let’s put some more effort into it and bring something new to the people!

Everybody looks like clones and the only people you notice are my age. I don’t notice anybody unless they look great, and every now and again they do, and they are usually 70.

I think when people make a record with a goal in mind – like taking it to the next level or making them seem more mature – that gets in the way of writing great songs.

If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.

Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

I like to combine the dramatic emotional warmth of strings with the grooves and body business of drums and bass.

The great music for so many artists – the Beatles, the Rolling Stones – was always at the moment when they were closest to pop. It would be easy for U2 to go off and have a concept album, but I want us to stay in the pop fray.

I can operate in half-a-song format.

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.

When I joined Nirvana, I was the fifth or sixth drummer – I don’t know if they’d ever had a drummer they were totally happy with. And they were strangers. There was never much of a deeper connection outside of the music.

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.

The music we do is for people to enjoy, dance and sing to it. Dreamers – keep on dreaming and keep working hard to achieve your goals. There are many difficulties, but what matters is to stay focused and have perseverance.

When it comes down to it, glam rock was all very amusing. At the time, it was funny, then a few years later it became sort of serious-looking and a bit foreboding.

I always say, you gotta play a dive bar like you play an arena, and you play an arena like you play a dive bar.

You go to a festival, you know you’re not going to play all new material at a festival. The audience is not there for that. I’ve made that mistake, but you find out pretty quickly.

I wish I could make music about politics. I feel like it’s such an art and a talent that I admire tremendously, but when I step into the studio, I step out of the real world, and it’s therapeutic.

I think I don’t take myself too seriously. You know as far as, it’s a fun life. I take my music serious, but I like to have fun.

I just wanted to be a composer; I became an actor by default, really. I got a scholarship to a college of music and drama, hoping to take a scholarship in music. But I ended up as an acting student, so I’ve stuck with that for the last 50-odd years.

The love of the family, the love of one person can heal. It heals the scars left by a larger society. A massive, powerful society.

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.

My body is damaged from music in two ways. I have a red irritation in my stomach. It’s psychosomatic, caused by all the anger and the screaming. I have scoliosis, where the curvature of your spine is bent, and the weight of my guitar has made it worse. I’m always in pain, and that adds to the anger in our music.

All government, of course, is against liberty.

Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.

The middle class is so funny, it’s the class I know best, and it’s the class where you find the most pretension, so that’s what makes the middle classes so funny.

My purpose is to make exciting music, and I feel like I’ll be doing that for the rest of my life, so there’s no pressure.

Everybody’s journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.

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

In much of society, research means to investigate something you do not know or understand.

Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.

Music is the art of the prophets and the gift of God.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

If we are peaceful, if we are happy, we can smile, and everyone in our family, our entire society, will benefit from our peace.