Great Throughts Treasury

"If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice!"

"You don't get something for nothing. You can't have freedom for free. You won't get wise with the sleep still in your eyes no matter what your dreams might be."

"And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start to mold a new reality closer to the heart."

"It's a test of ultimate will, the heartbreak climb uphill. Got to pick up the pace if you want to stay in the race. More than just blind ambition, more than just simple greed, more than just a finish line, must feed this burning need."

"What you own is your own kingdom. What you do is your own glory. What you love is your own power. What you live is your own story."

"You can surrender without a prayer, but never really pray. Pray without surrender. You can fight without ever winning, but never ever win without a fight."

"I can worship Nature, and that fulfills my need for miracles and beauty. Art gives a spiritual depth to existence -- I can find worlds bigger and deeper than my own in music, paintings, and books. And from my friends and family I receive the highest benediction, emotional contact, and personal affirmation. I can bow before the works of Man, from buildings to babies, and that fulfills my need for wonder. I can believe in the sanctity of Life, and that becomes the Revealed Word, to live my life as I believe it should be, not as I'm told to by self-appointed guides."

"If the future's looking dark, We're the ones who have to shine. If there's no one in control, We're the ones who draw the line. Though we live in trying times, We're the ones who have to try. And we know that time has wings, So we're the ones who have to fly."

"No changes are permanent, but change is."

"A spirit with a vision is a dream with a mission."

"Each of us A cell of awareness / Imperfect and incomplete / Genetic blends / With uncertain ends / On a fortune hunt that's far too fleet."

"You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice. If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill. I will choose a path thats clear. I will choose Freewill."

"Courageous convictions will drag the dream into existence."

"A quality of justice, a quantity of light, a particle of mercy, makes the color of right."

"All preordained a prisoner in chains a victim of venomous fate kicked in the face. You can't pray for a place in heaven's unearthly estate. Each of us a cell of awareness imperfect and incomplete. Genetic blends with uncertain ends on a fortune hunt that's far too fleet."

"Books, I think, are a different kind of time machine. Instead of reminding you of a lost world, they create one for you. more personal, more intimate-unlike movies, say, the world you experience while reading a book has been lived and envisioned entirely from the INSIDE, and its contours are yours alone."

"Adventures suck when you're having them."

"Could Hell be a place where there is no self-respect? A place where people have no pride in their own existence or behavior, and thus would have none for anyone or anything else?"

"Anytime I have an idea, I'll make sure that I put it down so that when we do sit down to write an album, I don't have to dream it all out of thin air. I don't have to be creative on the spur of the moment, or spontaneously artistic. I just take advantage of whenever creativity strikes."

"Don't try to change Doofus, let Doofus change you."

"Ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to play music that I liked, and even when I was in cover bands when I was a teenager we only played cover tunes that we liked. That was the simple morality that I grew up with."

"Each of us, a cell of awareness... imperfect, and incomplete."

"Excitement is found along the road, not at the end, and likewise, peace is not a fixed point-except perhaps in the unwanted rest in peace sense. PEACE is the breathing space between destinations, between excitements, an occasional part of the journey, if you're lucky. PEACE is a space you move through very rarely, and very briefly-but you?re not allowed to stay there. You have to keep moving, and go do what you do. because you can..."

"For me, drum elements are like hieroglyphics - I think of a certain physical figure, and a little three-dimensional glyph will appear in my mind as I'm playing."

"Extroverts never understand introverts, and it was like that in school days. I read recently that all of us can be defined in adult life by the way others perceived us in high school."

"From the point of ignition. To the final drive. The point of the journey is not to arrive."

"From first to last, the peak is never passed. Something always fires the light that gets in your eyes."

"I believe in taxation and health care that is outside the usual libertarian mandate, because I don't want people to have to suffer. It's as simple as that."

"Geddy once joked, 'You're the only guy I know who rehearses to rehearse!"

"Half the world cries. Half the world laughs. Half the world tries. To be the other half"

"I don't like lyrics that are just thrown together, that were obviously written as you went along, or the song was already written and the guy made up the lyrics in five minutes."

"Half the world hates what half the world does every day. Half the world waits while half gets on with it anyway."

"I had spindly little ankles, and growing up in Canada, I couldn't skate. I was no good at any sports so was very much a pariah through those adolescent years."

"I was far and away-riding my motorcycle along an American back road, skiing through the snowy Quebec woods, or lying awake in a backwater motel. the theme I was grappling with was nothing less than the Meaning of Life, and I was pretty sure I had defined it: love and respect. Love and respect, love and respect-i have been carrying those words around with me for two years, daring to consider that perhaps they convey the real meaning of life. beyond basic survival needs, everybody wants to be loved and respected. and neither is any good without the other. love without respect can be as cold as pity; respect without love can be as grim as fear. Love and respect are the values in life that most contribute to the pursuit of happiness-and after, they are the greatest legacy we can leave behind. it's an elegy you'd like to hear with your own ears: you were loved and respected. If even one person can say that about you, it's a worthy achievement, and if you can multiply that many times-well, that is true success. Among materialists, a certain bumper sticker is emblematic: he who dies with the most toys wins! Well, no-he or she who dies with the most love and respect wins... then there's love and respect for oneself-equally hard to achieve and maintain. most of us, deep down, are not as proud of ourselves as we might pretend, and the goal of bettering ourselves-at least partly by earning the love and respect of others-is a lifelong struggle. Philo of Alexandria gave us that generous principle that we have somehow succeeded in mostly ignoring for 2,000 years: Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

"If it's cross-country ski season, I'll be out doing that, or snowshoeing up in Quebec. In my California home, I go to the local Y and I like doing yoga. It's been hugely beneficial to me in injury avoidance."

"I expect if you're a professional public speaker, you probably wouldn't want to go onstage and sing and play drums."

"I want to be an improviser, and I've worked very hard at that. It's an art. You don't just play whatever comes into your head; you have to be very deliberate about what you do."

"If you've got a problem, take it out on a drum."

"It was actually drumming that gave me the stamina to get into sports later. I started playing drums at 13, and when I got to the international touring level... I got interested in cross-country skiing, long-distance swimming, bicycling... things that require stamina, not finesse."

"I'm still no good at ball-and-stick games. If I go play golf with the guys, it's intended to be a joke."

"It's interesting. I've known quite a few good athletes that can't begin to play a beat on the drum set. Most team sport is about the smooth fluidity of hand-eye coordination and physical grace, where drumming is much more about splitting all those things up."

"Performing live in front of an audience is such a matter of will - all of those things you can do just fine in your basement, suddenly you have to do them in front of hundreds or thousands of people, and it becomes a different matter entirely."

"Stamina is the force that drives the drumming; it's not really a sprint."

"Playing a three-hour Rush show is like running a marathon while solving equations."

"Now I call myself a bleeding heart libertarian. Because I do believe in the principles of Libertarianism as an ideal - because I'm an idealist."

"People don't realize the limitations of 200 words, and the way they get chiseled down into a song that has to be sung."

"The Seven Cities of Gold always fascinated me. Southwestern U.S. history especially fascinates me. The whole spur of the Spanish exploration of the Southwestern U.S. was the search for these mythical Seven Cities of Gold."

"There's still a lot I'm angry about, a lot of human behavior that's appalling and despicable, but you choose what you can fight against. I always thought if I could just put something in words perfectly enough, people would get the idea and it would change things."

"The measure of a life is a measure of love and respect, so hard to earn so easily burned in the fullness of time, a garden to nurture and protect it's a measure of a life. The treasure of a life is a measure of love and respect, the way you live, the gifts that you give in the fullness of time, it's the only return that you expect"

"To get nostalgic about other people's music, or even about your own, makes a terrible statement about the condition of your life and your prospects for the future. I have no patience with that kind of attitude, whether it's on radio or among friends."