Great Throughts Treasury

"The establishment of a rating system, voluntary or otherwise, opens the door to an endless parade of moral quality control programs based on things certain Christians do not like. What if the next bunch of Washington wives demands a large yellow "J" on all material written or performed by Jews, in order to save helpless children from exposure to concealed Zionist doctrine?"

"The last election just laid the foundation of the next 500 years of Dark Ages."

"The language and concepts contained herein are guaranteed not to cause eternal torment in the place where the guy with the horns and pointed stick conducts his business."

"The first thing you have to do if you want to raise nice kids, is you have to talk to them like they are people instead of talking to them like they're property."

"The lifestyle that I have is probably neither desirable nor useful to most people. Most people are probably better off getting the certification they desire and spindling their lives away the way they’re doing. I don’t think they’d enjoy living any other way. There are millions of people who acquire all sorts of wonderful feelings from watching a football game and drinking a bottle of beer. It makes them really happy. Doesn’t do shit for me. But for them it’s life itself. As long as they can believe in the beer and the football, then they’ve really got something. And it’s probably more useful to them than religion. So why take it away? Why tell them what’s really going on? Let ’em be happy."

"The illusion of freedom [in America] will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater."

"The mainstream comes to you, but you have to go to the underground."

"The manner in which Americans "consume" music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie -- it's consumed that way without any regard for how and why it's made."

"The most important thing to do in your life is to not interfere with somebody else's life."

"The most important thing in art is the frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively - because, without this humble appliance, you can't know where The Art stops and The Real World begins. You have to put a "box" around it because otherwise, what is that shit on the wall?"

"The more boring a child is, the more the parents, when showing off the child, receive adulation for being good parents — because they have a tame child-creature in their house."

"The other factor that people forget about the southern region is the amount of intermarriage that has already occurred there, and so there are certain genetic defects come to the fore when you have a large intermarriage population. That means regression... And in fact Utah is another state, which is basically owned by the Mormon church, which also has a lot of intermarriage. And because this type of inter-marriage there is a large proportion of blind people in Utah. That's why when you go across the street, instead of just a stop light that you can see, they have stop lights that make a cuckoo noise to tell you when to cross the street -- that's true!"

"The people of your century no longer require the service of composers."

"The richest people in the world aren’t particularly smart or happy. And the happiest people in the world aren’t particularly smart or rich.… That leaves me making music. But we can’t talk about that."

"The price of meat has just gone up and your old lady has just gone down."

"The rock and roll business is pretty absurd, but the world of serious music is much worse."

"The things that were happening in 1955 were cosmic ... in terms of music history."

"The people of your century no longer require the service of composers. A composer is as useful to a person in a jogging suit as a dinsoaur turd in the middle of his runway."

"The typical rock fan is not smart enough to know when he is being dumped on."

"The U.S. is a mere pup tent of a civilization. We’ve got two hundred years of stupidity behind us and we think we’re right up there with everyone else who’s been doing it for thousands of years."

"The Ultimate Rule ought to be: 'If it sounds GOOD to you, it's bitchin'; if it sounds BAD to YOU, it's shitty. The more your musical experience, the easier it is to define for yourself what you like and what you don't like. American radio listeners, raised on a diet of _____ (fill in the blank), have experienced a musical universe so small they cannot begin to know what they like."

"The two most common things in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity."

"The United States is a nation of laws, badly written and randomly enforced."

"Their stupidity does not amaze me, it’s when they're smart that amazes me. It's baffling whenever you find someone who's smart — incredible. Soon you'll have zoos for such things."

"The whole foundation of Christianity is based on the idea that intellectualism is the work of the Devil. Remember the apple on the tree? Okay, it was the Tree of Knowledge. "You eat this apple, you're going to be as smart as God. We can't have that.""

"The whole Universe is a large joke. Everything in the Universe are just subdivisions of this joke. So why take anything too serious."

"There are three things that smell of fish. One of them is fish. The other two are growing on you!"

"There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life."

"There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another."

"There isn’t anything weird about my music. Weird is a skeleton in the closet, wearing a rubber mask with warts all over its nose, and all that kind of shit. That’s not what I do. The thing that makes my music unusual is that people only hear one kind of music all the time over the radio. It’s wallpaper to their lives. Audile wallpaper. There’s one acceptable beat and there are three acceptable chord progressions. There are five acceptable words: baby, love, tears, yat yat. Just because I don’t deal in those terms doesn’t mean I’m weird. So tell these people: I ain’t weird; I’m rational. I’m a person who can choose to write stuff like that, or choose to write stuff that includes all the notes on the piano played at once, followed by a cement truck driving over the piano, followed by a small atomic explosion. Nothing weird about that as long as you do it in a meaningful way."

"There is no such thing as a dirty word. Nor is there a word so powerful, that it's going to send the listener to the lake of fire upon hearing it."

"There is no hell. There is only France."

"There will never be a nuclear war; there's too much real estate involved."

"To me, absurdity is the only reality."

"There's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over."

"Tobacco is my favorite vegetable."

"Those Jesus Freaks. Well, they're friendly but the shit they believe has got their minds all shut an' they don't even care when the church takes a cut. Ain't it bleak when you got so much nothin'."

"There’s no reason to assume that my idea of what‘s better would really be better. I resent it when other people try to inflict their ideas of betterness on me. I don’t think they know. And I can’t see any authority on the horizon that’s got any answers that seem worthwhile. Most of the things that are suggested are probably detrimental to your mental health."

"Well Mike [Douglas], I'm abnormal."

"We live in a very special time right now. At no other time in history has there been such mass disillusionment in terms of reliance on governing functions. Most people don’t want to come to terms with that. It’s been proven over and over again that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes, but most people don’t like to look at naked emperors. In the process of turning around to avert their eyes, they saw the discotheques and a few other things and latched onto them."

"Watch out where the huskies go, and don't you eat that yellow snow."

"Well, I believe that those energies and processes exist. I just don't think that they've been adequately described or adequately named yet, because people are too willing to make it all into something that supports a religious theory of one flavor or another. If you start defining these things in nuts-and-bolts scientific terms, people reject it because it's not fun, y'know. It takes some of the romance out of being dead ... because of people's desires to have eternal life and to extend their influence from beyond the grave ... all that Houdini type stuff ... but basically, I think when you're dead ... you're dead. It comes with the territory."

"Well, I'm not here to impinge on anybody else's lifestyle. If I'm in a place where I know I'm going to harm somebody's health or somebody asks me to please not smoke, I just go outside and smoke. But I do resent the way the nonsmoking mentality has been imposed on the smoking minority. Because, first of all, in a democracy, minorities do have rights. And, second, the whole pitch about smoking has gone from being a health issue to a moral issue, and when they reduce something to a moral issue, it has no place in any kind of legislation, as far as I'm concerned."

"When God created Republicans, he gave up on everything else."

"Whatever you have to do to have a good time, let's get on with it, so long as it doesn't cause a murder."

"Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are?"

"Why doncha come on over to the house and I'll show 'em to ya?"

"Who are the brain police?"

"Why should I smile when I'm sitting here with you?"

"Without Louie Louie a symphony is not quite so grand."