“You need music, I don’t know why. It’s probably one of those Joe Campbell questions, why we need ritual.”

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.

Cats on the bandstand, give them each a big hand, anyone who sweats like that must be all right.

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

The context has to come from the human first, rather than bits and pieces of fragments of old religion and all of the old moral superstructure, whatever it used to be.

You ain’t gonna learn what you don’t wanna know.

I’m trying to have a guitar built. What’s needed is better instruments, better amplifiers, better hardware for electric music to get better.

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 that the revolution in music is over, and what’s left is a mop-up action. It’s a matter of the news getting out to everybody else.

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

The result, I think, is pretty interesting … we don’t expect to make a fortune at it or ever be popular or famous or worshipped or hit The Ed Sullivan Show or the circuses or the big top.

We didn’t invent the Grateful Dead, the crowd invented the Grateful Dead.