Weakness is what brings ignorance, cheapness, racism, homophobia, desperation, cruelty, brutality, all these things that will keep a society chained to the ground, one foot nailed to the floor.
— Henry Rollins
When you're going into an employment environment that looks pretty scary, it is easy to lose your moral compass, your decency, your sense of civility and your sense of community.
Miles Davis would have this lineup of all these amazing musicians and one day would just say, 'We're done.' After tons of great records and tickets sold, he said, 'Now I'm going to grow my hair out and play my horn through a wah-wah pedal.' Rather than play it safe, he went on.
Voting is completely important. People in America think democracy is a given. I think of it as an ecosystem, and what gets in the way of it is politicians and apathy.
I always start tours with a great deal of anticipation.
There's tons of junk food for your mind on the Internet. You can sit there for three or 10 or 20 hours a day getting in online arguments with other people who also choose to waste their time.
If you listen to 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,' by Gil Scott-Heron, that album is dripping with rage.
All my big heroes are literary, writers.
Music to me is mankind's greatest possible achievement because look at all the good it does.
I'm not exactly ambitious as much as I have a very good realization of what I am and what I am capable of.
Change is hard, but change is good.
If I'm in L.A. for longer than 20 days, I'm looking for work, because I don't do vacations.
Some music really does suck!
August, the summer's last messenger of misery, is a hollow actor.
The scarcity of the music not only makes the music itself enjoyable but it also gives the collector a strange sense of superiority.
When people hold you in high esteem, it's very delicate relationship. When they meet you they're putting all their chips up. It's make or break.
I was a very repressed young person. I wasn't good at school. I didn't fit in.
Without an education, you won't have a future.
I find it takes a lot of strength to endure myself.
When you are young, there is so much ahead of you, it's like the Saharan desert. You can't even see across it.
I would like to become a better photographer. I'm working on that.
Anything in this culture that stands still long enough eventually becomes okay if a person can derive an income from it. Eventually, pay-per-view public execution will happen, and it will be half-time entertainment.
This is my own little rock theory: In my mind, Nirvana slayed the hair bands. They shot the top off the poodles.
I'm not into fame. I'm not into making money, outside of financing my books. I'm not into status. My thing is basically about time - not wasting it.
I'm not a very good writer. I'm working at it.
There's always going to be a need for activism; there's always going to be a need for you and me doing the right thing, being very Lincoln-sonian in looking out for each other.
I think young people should travel and travel often to other countries... like I do.
I love being a storyteller. I love telling stories.
The first several years of my life were used to upload incredible amounts of fear, and I just became afraid of everything. I was afraid of my parents, afraid of my classmates, afraid of the streets of Washington, D.C. I would flinch at every gesture.
Every summer, around late July and into August, I find myself in Europe, performing at any festival that will have me.
We know that in September, we will wander through the warm winds of summer's wreckage. We will welcome summer's ghost.
Collecting records is, for many, beyond a hobby.
To this day, my haircut is the number two clippers, which I apply to myself every month.
I take the work seriously, just not myself in it.
You must never lower yourself to being a person you don't like.
Rarely do I do film press because I'm so low on the food chain of the movie, and for me it's just this thing I did for four weeks before the next tour started.
The best compliment I get every year is that a band will write me and say, 'We were just on tour, and we had people coming to our show saying they had never heard us before they heard us on your show.'
I would like go to Palestine and interview people there about what their lives are like; same thing in Iran.
As a young person, I was on the road playing music, so I was getting new environments shoved in my face whether I wanted them or not.
I don't cuss in songs. It's too easy.
I love capitalism. It rewards me for being brave - it awards me for being innovative and thinking out of the box.
For a long time, when I was very young, I went to go see arena rock bands. I was 16, and it was all I could get in to see, legally. And I saw Led Zeppelin and Ted Nugent and Van Halen and all that.
I don't think you'll ever have a perfect world because we humans are prone to error, and so we're always in search of an upgrade.
I think a lot of Americans have never been all that hungry. They've never had war on their shore, and they've never suffered the way other cultures have suffered. I'm not saying we should go suffer. Not at all. I'm saying we should be more aware of how other cultures exist.
To me, getting muscular was the first thing I ever achieved by working at it, and it was a game changer for me, because it was the first time I ever had confidence.
If I hear, 'Be afraid of Tehran,' I'm like, 'I'd better go to Tehran.'
I have never experienced anything like walking out onto the stage of an oversold venue and, before the first note is struck, realizing that there is not going to be enough oxygen for all of us.
Every year, August lashes out in volcanic fury, rising with the din of morning traffic, its great metallic wings smashing against the ground, heating the air with ever-increasing intensity.
When the movie comes out, what anybody thinks of it doesn't really matter to me. I don't go to the wrap party. I don't go to the premiere.
After I left D.C. to join Black Flag, I felt I was in a band.
