I honestly think I am a better player than I was four years ago, when I was No. 1 in the world.
Men are more often bribed by their loyalties and ambitions than by money.
It is not the function of government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.
To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds.
The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs, which we seek to condemn and punish, have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason.
In our country are evangelists and zealots of many different political, economic and religious persuasions whose fanatical conviction is that all thought is divinely classified into two kinds - that which is their own and that which is false and dangerous.
Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.
I had a slight touch of Tourette's, which means you talk to yourself and bark and cry out at night.
When I see something I end up making a song about it and that's the way it is. There have been plenty of times when I've been in the studio and they were like, "Hey, why don't you make a song about such and such," and I just can't. I've gotta have it in my heart.
I'm not an L. A. guy. I don't take meetings - you know what I mean? I don't really know how to interact very well with people in L. A. because everybody's got an agenda and everybody's like, "What do you do?" "Where are you going?" Or it's like, "What do you know?" And I'm not on a grind - I was there to make music and to meet people but I wasn't hustling for anything.
I have never in my career embarked on a journey towards controversy. I have never deliberately set a flame.