“The thing about music is that nobody listens to it unless it’s real. I don’t think that you can fool anybody for too long in music. And you certainly can’t fool everybody.”

I think the Muslim religious is a little too tight. It doesn’t fit humans. Humans can’t possibly fit into it, so there are a lot of really unhappy people, terribly repressed.

I mean, just because you’re a musician doesn’t mean all your ideas are about music.

We were very fortunate to have a a little time in history when LSD was still legal and were able to experiment with drugs just like we were doing with music.

What we’re thinking about is a peaceful planet. We’re not thinking about anything else.

What we need is something, a definition of a human, starting from the ground up, so that the suitable moral structure that goes around it makes sense.

I have always had this basic biological question in terms of evolution, if the drive to evolution is to like survive.

As long as we can play, we’ll play, regardless of what it’s for, who it’s for or anything. It’s fun for us – that’s the important thing.

You have to get past the idea that music has to be one thing.

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.