“So every once in a while I get an idea about plumbing, I get an idea about city government, and they come the way they come.”

To get really high is to forget yourself. And to forget yourself is to see everything else. And to see everything else is to become an understanding molecule in evolution, a conscious tool of the universe.

… Grateful Dead – that’s it !! … nobody in the band liked it, (the name) I didn’t like it, either, but it got around that that was one of the candidates for our new name, and everyone else said, ‘Yeah, that’s great.’

The dialect part of it comes into play, but nothing like the differentiation that language sets up, for example.

Music goes way back before language does. And music is like the key to a whole spiritual existence which this society doesn’t even talk about. We know it’s there.

Each person makes their own decision about what it is that is happening, whether they like it or don’t like it, whether they want to lend their energy to it or not or what, you know.

It turned out to be tremendously lucky. It’s just repellent enough to filter curious onlookers and just quirky enough that parents don’t like it.

Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.

Getting high is a lot more real than listening to a politician. You can think that getting high actually did happen – that you danced, and got sweaty, and carried on. It really did happen.

It’s not enough to be the best at what you do. You must be perceived as the only one who does what you do.

Nothing left to do but smile.

I know what I’m askin’. I know it’s a lot. Just to say that I love you. Believe it or not.

In this universe the top end is light and the bottom end is real hard stuff.

I think it’s too bad that everybody’s decided to turn on drugs, I don’t think drugs are the problem.

Cats on the bandstand, give them each a big hand, anyone who sweats like that must be all right.

Somebody has to do something, and it’s just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.

The context has to come from the human first, rather than bits and pieces of fragments of old religion and all of the old moral superstructure, whatever it used to be.

Kuwait City is not gorgeous, actually, but it’s got a kind of Epcot Center thing going for it. It’s not pretty. But it’s striking, I’ll give it that. It’s not as over-the-top as Abu Dhabi or Dubai. But nearly.

Not since Ancient Greece have cities been thought of as the ideal living environment for humans. And that was so long ago it predates the invention of trousers.

A man of strong opinions is one thing. But a man whose strong opinions depend entirely on how he is feeling in that instant is a disastrous thing in a city of 10 million people just trying to muddle through.

In the beginning, we huddled in cities for our own protection.

I tried to leave the city once, for one of those other places. And, my God, the silence. I could hear myself think, and found that I wasn’t. I am not designed to be lonely as a cloud.

A city involves biomass. And biomass gets to me.

As drivers desert the city I find myself clinging more and more to my father’s belief that a man without a car is not really a man.

I run New York City!