“To me, that’s the key thing, the pursuit of happiness. That’s the basic, ultimate freedom.”

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

Playing in a group, I’m tending to think more about the music and less about the guitar. That’s just me getting older. I’m not interested in being a virtuoso guitar player or anything like that.

The satisfaction of producing a work of art is the thing of getting off on it on some level.

I mean, it saves you from ultimately from the boredom of having one point of view, like being locked in a room with nothing but your own point of view, your own references.

There’s a need for a ritual and for real joy and real bliss. Real fun.

I know when it happens. I know it when it happens every time.

If the thunder don’t get ya then the lightning will.

All I know is, if you listen to society, you’ll never get anywhere!

It’s pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness.

For me, I think the only danger is being too much in love with guitar playing. The MUSIC is the most important thing, and the guitar is only the instrument.

And there’s a lot of that stuff with people bringing their kids, kids bringing their parents, people bringing their grandparents.

The thing I would like to be able to do is to make the music sound right no matter what it is. If somebody else wants to have a label for it, then that’s their business.

In my own musical existence I don’t feel that being a guitar player is like the best thing on earth to be. I would rather be a balanced musician.

Sometimes the lights all shining on me, other times I can barely see. Lately it occurs to me what a long strange trip it’s been.

We are experiencing a real confusion here in the United States, you know. Why is it OK to drink, but it’s not OK to take drugs?

The pursuit of happiness is an overview kind of thing. It’s not in the Bill of Rights.

Political tags – such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth – are never basic criteria.

Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically – for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist – but then what isn’t?

To aid life, leaving it free, however, that is the basic task of the educator.

No matter what engineering field you’re in, you learn the same basic science and mathematics. And then maybe you learn a little bit about how to apply it.

How we ended up there and how we got to where we are today, without having some basic.

To succeed, you will soon learn, as I did, the importance of a solid foundation in the basics of education – literacy, both verbal and numerical, and communication skills.

But Basic happened to be on a GE timesharing system that was done by Dartmouth, and when GE decided to franchise that, it started spreading Basic around just because it was there, not because it had any intrinsic merits whatsoever.

School is basically about one point of view — the one the teacher has or the textbooks have.