“I realised a long time ago that instrumental music speaks a lot more clearly than English, Spanish, Yiddish, Swahili, any other language. Pure melody goes outside time.”

Music rearranges your molecular structure.

I’m ready to do something with Lady Gaga or Andrea Bocelli. I’m really grateful that nothing is out of the realm of possibility.

I can show you that I have played with just about every jazz musician, every African musician, every blues musician. It’s not like I’m cashing in on a false concept. This is what I do.

You’ve got to change your evil ways, baby, before I start loving you.

There is no greater reward than working from your heart and making a difference in the world.

Bring the brothers home, and sisters home now. Legalize marijuana and take all that money and invest it in teachers and in education. You will see a transformation in America.

Everybody sooner or later has to drop the luggage and the baggage of illusions.

You cannot behave appropriately, unless you perceive correctly. Once you perceive you are a beam of Light, that comes from the mind of God, you will carry yourself differently.

I know I’m not the kind of person who’s gonna wind up a walking jukebox, like many rock ‘n’ roll artists. They just play their hits and that’s it. That doesn’t appeal to me.

I am becoming the people I love.

I don’t eat meat because meat brings out negative qualities such as fear, anger, anxiety, aggressiveness, etc. Vegetables peacefully offer themselves to the earth when ripe, thus allowing a sublime and peaceful thought-consciousness.

Some musicians, man, you hear the note almost before they hit it. Jimi, Coltrane and Charlie Parker were like that.

Blues was my first love. It was the first thing where I said, ‘Oh man, this is the stuff.’ It just sounded so raw and honest, gut-bucket honest. From then I started rebelling.

The music of Hendrix wakes people up to their possibilities. It’s more than just dreaming about being a guitar hero.

I have been accused of being a very simplistic, very lyrical player, and that’s okay. That just comes from the blues, which is my background. But every day you wake up and transcend. You can’t ever rest on your laurels.

Whether you are doing it in the bar, the church, the strip joint, or the Himalayas, the first duty of music is to complement and enhance life.

Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.

I often write scripts to instrumentals like a hip-hop artist. Music inspires me to write.

My mother and father didn’t know anything about instruments. Me just see a man in the country play guitar one time and say, ‘My, the man play that guitar nice.’

The vote is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have.

One thing that concerns me is that today’s young women don’t seem to care that we have a fundamental instrument of government that makes no express statement about the equal citizenship stature of men and women.

If we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity.

Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.

No, painting is not interior decoration. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.