“To be alive in America is to hear all kinds of music constantly: radio, records, churches, cats on the street, everywhere music. And with records, the whole history of music is open to everyone who wants to hear it.”

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.

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.

We worry a great deal about the problem of church and state. Now what about the church and God?

Lutheranism restricted itself to an exclusively ecclesiastical and theological character, while Calvinism put its impress in and outside the church upon every aspect of human life.

They realize the no money, no church service, no eulogy, no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit.

It is impossible, Bible in hand, to limit Christ’s Church to one’s own little community.

The seminaries must be like the churches’ poor relations, prolonging their existence with austerity.

Sometimes there seems to be a greater separation between the church and God than between the church and state.

Bro Snow said I would live to see the time when brothers and sisters would marry each other in this church.

A church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.