“If there’s one thing you can say about mankind, there’s nothing kind about man.”

I’d rather have a free bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy.

I never told the truth so i can never tell a lie.

Most of the people I admire, they usually smell funny and don’t get out much. It’s true. Most of them are either dead or not feeling well.

The Universe is making music all the time.

Their memory’s like a train: you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away And the things you can’t remember Tell the things you can’t forget that History puts a saint in every dream.

But then I’m one of those guys that is still a bit afraid of the telephone, its implications for conversation. I still wonder if the jukebox might be the death of live music.

I like turning on two radios at once. I like hearing things wrong. I get a lot of ideas by mishearing things.

When your down on your luck and you’ve lost all your dreams theres nothing like a campfire and a can of beans.

We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness.

The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.

Most of the things you absorb you will ultimately secrete.

For a songwriter, you don’t really go to songwriting school; you learn by listening to tunes. And you try to understand them and take them apart and see what they’re made of, and wonder if you can make one, too.

All that you’ve loved is all you own.

I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.

My wife called me a mule. She once said, “I didn’t marry a man; I married a mule!” I kept thinking about it. It was in the back of my head. I think it makes a good title for an album.

You’re innocent when you dream.

War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.

Because it is in the nature of things that they become extreme, we have passed down from manliness to cruelty. If I had been told when I was 20 that there was a tavern in the town where the brave and the cruel were gathered together,

You are permitted to be cruel sometimes, and you are allowed to fall apart, and feel every emotion they tell you not to feel.

And, unfortunately, the cruelty and killing are often justified through a distorted interpretation of religion

Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.

When the world has been unkind, when life’s troubles cloud your mind, Don’t sit down and frown and sigh and moon and mope. Take a walk along the square, fill your lungs with God’s fresh air, Then go whistling back to work and smile and hope.

Heaven always shower His mercy on us and we return it with our cruelty.

Ah, cruel ’tis to love, And cruel not to love, But cruelest of all To love and love in vain.