“I think that the important changes have already happened, changes in consciousness. It’s mostly a matter of everything else catching up to that.”

If you think of music as a universal language, it still has some very powerful dialects.

Some things may work, but they definitely won’t work every time. Some things may work at various times.

It’s much too late to do anything about rock & roll now.

Right now, America is under the gun. It’s being tested and is being co-opted in a big way.

Now it has gotten a whole new leg. It has gotten a thing of being able to actually step in somebody’s reality and walk through it like they do, experience it the way they do, specifically.

If you assume you haven’t learned anything yet, there’s no reason your playing can’t stay dynamic all your life.

We’re like licorice. Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.

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.

Blah, blah, blah. What’s a crime? What’s criminality? What can you do, what can’t you do, and so forth. All these things are really confusing. A lot of it is really contradictory; it doesn’t really make sense.

The bigger issue, was the whole takeover of the food industry by big corporations.

I mean, it’s gotten to be really stretched out now. It was never my intention to say, this is the demographics of our audience.

See, there’s only two theaters, man that are set up pretty groovy all around for music and for smooth stage changes, good lighting and all that – the Fillmore and The Capitol Theatre. And those are the only two in the whole country.

We need magic, and bliss, and power, myth, and celebration and religion in our lives, and music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it.

You have to be ready, and also you have to discard notions that are fondly held by a lot of musicians, about sequences and notes and about scales and musical systems as a whole. If you think of music as a language, the space part is where you throw out all the syntax.

A simple life, a good life. And think about moving the whole human race ahead a step, or a few steps.

We’re involved in a society which is undergoing some really weird changes now.

May we always be possessed by the consciousness that we are not our own.

We – mankind – stand at the center of an evolutionary crisis, with a new evolutionary device – our consciousness of the crisis – as our unique contribution.

There is nothing holier in this life of ours than the first consciousness of love, the first fluttering of its silken wings.

Now, what really makes a teacher is love for the human child; for it is love that transforms the social duty of the educator into the higher consciousness of a mission.

Birds and animals probably think without knowing that they think; that is, they have not self-consciousness.

An organism that survives well, there is really no need for consciousness in there.

What is life but being conscious? And good and evil are manifestations of consciousness. If you reject one, you’re not getting the whole thing that’s there to be had.

I never took hallucinogenic drugs because I never wanted my consciousness expanded one unnecessary iota.