Frank Zappa famous quotes

The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.
-- Frank Zappa

#Funny #Sarcastic #Sarcasm

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.
-- Frank Zappa

#Music #Writing #Air

If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.
-- Frank Zappa

#Sex #Book #Reading

The only difference between a cult and a religion is the amount of real estate they own.
-- Frank Zappa

#Real #Differences #Estates

It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia. Eventually within the next quarter of a century, the nostalgia cycles will be so close together that people will not be able to take a step without being nostalgic for the one they just took. At that point, everything stops. Death by Nostalgia.
-- Frank Zappa

#Two #Fire #Ice

Government is the Entertainment division of the military-industrial complex.
-- Frank Zappa

#Military #Government #Political

Anybody who wants religion is welcome to it, as far as I'm concerned--I support your right to enjoy it. However, I would appreciate it if you exhibited more respect for the rights of those people who do not wish to share your dogma, rapture, or necrodestination.
-- Frank Zappa

#Inspirational #Life #Rights

I never set out to be weird. It was always other people who called me weird.
-- Frank Zappa

#Funny #Bullying #People

There's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over.
-- Frank Zappa

#Atheist #Differences #Religion

The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.
-- Frank Zappa

#Wall #Moving #Long

Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.
-- Frank Zappa

#Business #People #Political

The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows.
-- Frank Zappa

#Missing You #Emotional #Eyebrows

Nobody looks good with brown lipstick on.
-- Frank Zappa

#Looks #Brown #Lipstick

The first thing you have to do if you want to raise nice kids, is you have to talk to them like they are people instead of talking to them like they're property.
-- Frank Zappa

#Nice #Kids #Talking

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.
-- Frank Zappa

#Music #Time #Bills

Take the Kama Sutra. How many people died from the Kama Sutra as opposed to the Bible? Who wins?
-- Frank Zappa

#Winning #People

The more boring a child is, the more the parents, when showing off the child, receive adulation for being good parents — because they have a tame child-creature in their house.
-- Frank Zappa

#Children #House #Parent

Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.
-- Frank Zappa

#Positive #Inspiring #Autism

Republicans stand for raw, unbridled evil and greed and ignorance smothered in balloons and ribbons.
-- Frank Zappa

#Ignorance #Evil #Greed

lf you’re going to deal with reality, you’re going to have to make one big discovery: Reality is something that belongs to you as an individual. If you wanna grow up, which most people don’t, the thing to do is take responsibility for your own reality and deal with it on your own terms. Don’t expect that because you pay some money to somebody else or take a pledge or join a club or run down the street or wear a special bunch of clothes or play a certain sport or even drink Perrier water, it’s going to take care of everything for you.
-- Frank Zappa

#Sports #Running #Growing Up

Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is THE BEST.
-- Frank Zappa

#Love #Music #Wisdom

A drug is not bad. A drug is a chemical compound. The problem comes in when people who take drugs treat them like a license to behave like an asshole.
-- Frank Zappa

#Funny #People #Drug

If we cannot be free, we can at least be cheap
-- Frank Zappa

You've got to be digging it while it's happening 'cause it just might be a one shot deal.
-- Frank Zappa

#Atheism #Digging #Might

A true Zen saying: "Nothing is what I want.
-- Frank Zappa

#Want #Saying Nothing

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.
-- Frank Zappa

#Music #Clouds #Air

Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are?
-- Frank Zappa

#Thinking #People

The creation and destruction of harmonic and 'statistical' tensions is essential to the maintenance of compositional drama. Any composition (or improvisation) which remains consonant and 'regular' throughout is, for me, equivalent to watching a movie with only 'good guys' in it, or eating cottage cheese.
-- Frank Zappa

#Music #Drama #Guitar

It has never mattered to me that thirty million people might think I'm wrong. The number of people who thought Hitler was right did not make him right... Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are?
-- Frank Zappa

#Thinking #Numbers #People

The rock and roll business is pretty absurd, but the world of serious music is much worse.
-- Frank Zappa

#Business #Rocks #Rock And Roll

My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is: Keep him or her as far away from a church as you can.
-- Frank Zappa

#Children #Advice #Healthy

Most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read.
-- Frank Zappa

#Writing #Rocks #People

You can't always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.
-- Frank Zappa

#Beauty #Writing #Atheism

You is what you am, a cow don't make ham.
-- Frank Zappa

#Ham #Cows #Adages

Stupidity is the basic building block of the universe.
-- Frank Zappa

#Block #Stupidity #Building

The whole foundation of Christianity is based on the idea that intellectualism is the work of the Devil. Remember the apple on the tree? Okay, it was the Tree of Knowledge. You eat this apple, you're going to be as smart as God. We can't have that.
-- Frank Zappa

#Smart #Ideas #Apples

It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.
-- Frank Zappa

#Fire #Ice #Two

Anything played wrong twice in a row is the beginning of an arrangement.
-- Frank Zappa

#Inspirational

The most important thing to do in your life is to not interfere with somebody else's life.
-- Frank Zappa

#Funny Life #Important #Life Is

The disgusting stink of a too-loud electric guitar; now that's my idea of a good time.
-- Frank Zappa

#Guitar #Ideas #Good Times

who are the brain police?
-- Frank Zappa

#Police #Brain

Sometimes you got to get sick before you can feel better.
-- Frank Zappa

#Feel Better #Sick #Sometimes

There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another.
-- Frank Zappa

#Love #Music #Marriage

You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.
-- Frank Zappa

#Funny #Country #Football

Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.
-- Frank Zappa

#Block #Stupid #Ignorance

There are only two things to remember. Number one...Don't Stop, and number two...Keep Going!
-- Frank Zappa

#Two #Numbers #Remember

Stupidity has a certain charm - ignorance does not.
-- Frank Zappa

#Ignorance #Stupidity #Doe

There is no hell. There is only France.
-- Frank Zappa

#France #Hell

Watch out where the Huskies go And don't you eat that yellow snow
-- Frank Zappa

#Song #Yellow #Snow

The bigger the cushion, the better the pushin'.
-- Frank Zappa

#Bigger

The Ultimate Rule ought to be: 'If it sounds GOOD to you, it's bitchin'; if it sounds BAD to YOU, it's shitty. The more your musical experience, the easier it is to define for yourself what you like and what you don't like. American radio listeners, raised on a diet of _____ (fill in the blank), have experienced a musical universe so small they cannot begin to know what they like.
-- Frank Zappa

#Musical #Sound #Radio

The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively - because without this humble appliance, you can't know where The Art stops and The Real World begins.
-- Frank Zappa

#Art #Real #Humble

Children are naive-they trust everyone. School is bad enough, but, if you put a child anywhere in the vicinity of a church, you're asking for trouble.
-- Frank Zappa

#Children #School #Church

I'm more interested in melodic things. I think the biggest challenge when you go to play a solo is trying to invent a melody on the spot.
-- Frank Zappa

#Thinking #Play #Challenges

The whole music business in the United States is based on numbers, based on unit sales and not on quality. It's not based on beauty, it's based on hype and it's based on cocaine. It's based on giving presents of large packages of dollars to play records on the air.
-- Frank Zappa

#Air #Play #Hype

What something is depends more on when it is than anything else.
-- Frank Zappa

There's no reason to assume that my idea of what's better would really be better. I resent it when other people try to inflict their ideas of betterness on me. I don't think they know. And I can't see any authority on the horizon that's got any answers that seem worthwhile. Most of the things that are suggested are probably detrimental to your mental health.
-- Frank Zappa

#Thinking #Ideas #People

On a personal level, Freaking Out is a process whereby an individual casts off outmoded and restricting standards of thinking, dress, and social etiquette in order to express creatively his relationship to his immediate environment and the social structure as a whole.
-- Frank Zappa

#Thinking #Order #Dresses

The bassoon is one of my favorite instruments. It has a medieval aroma, like the days when everything used to sound like that. Some people crave baseball...I find this unfathomable, but I can easily understand why a person could get excited about playing the bassoon.
-- Frank Zappa

#Baseball #People #Sound

Tobacco is my favorite vegetable.
-- Frank Zappa

#Vegetables #My Favorite #Tobacco

There is no such thing as a dirty word. Nor is there a word so powerful, that it's going to send the listener to the lake of fire upon hearing it.
-- Frank Zappa

#Powerful #Dirty #Fire

I think it is good that books still exist, but they do make me sleepy.
-- Frank Zappa

#Inspirational #Book #Learning

Music is always a commentary on society.
-- Frank Zappa

#Music #Music Is

Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.
-- Frank Zappa

#Believe #Support #Use

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.
-- Frank Zappa

#Branches #Politics #Entertainment

Most people wouldn't know music if it came up and bit them on the ass.
-- Frank Zappa

#Funny #Music #Humorous

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.
-- Frank Zappa

#Inspirational #Funny #Motivational

There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.
-- Frank Zappa

#Witty #Stupid #Humorous

Don't mind your make-up, you'd better make your mind up.
-- Frank Zappa

#Funny Inspirational #Mind

I knew Jimi (Hendrix) and I think that the best thing you could say about Jimi was: there was a person who shouldn't use drugs.
-- Frank Zappa

#Thinking #Drug #Use

If you want to get together in any exclusive situation and have people love you, fine - but to hang all this desperate sociology on the idea of The Cloud-Guy who has The Big Book, who knows if you've been bad or good - and CARES about any of it - to hang it all on that, folks, is the chimpanzee part of the brain working.
-- Frank Zappa

#Atheist #Book #Love You

Beware of the fish people, they are the true enemy.
-- Frank Zappa

#People #Enemy #Anarchy

Your mind is totally controlled, it has been stuffed into my mold. And you will do as you are told, until the rights to you are sold.
-- Frank Zappa

#Rights #Mind #Mold

Since I didn't have any kind of formal training, it didn't make any difference to me if I was listening to Lightnin' Slim, or a vocal group called the Jewels ... , or Webern, or Varèse, or Stravinsky. To me it was all good music.
-- Frank Zappa

#Jewels #Differences #Listening

The essence of Christianity is told us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on.
-- Frank Zappa

#Atheist #Garden #Essence

If you really love guitar, you're going to spend every waking hour stroking the thing.
-- Frank Zappa

#Funny #Inspiring #Guitar

Modern Americans behave as if intelligence were some sort of hideous deformity.
-- Frank Zappa

#Modern #Deformity #Behave

Reality is what it is, not what you want it to be.
-- Frank Zappa

#Reality #Religion #Atheism

If we can't be free at least we can be cheap.
-- Frank Zappa

Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read.
-- Frank Zappa

#Motivational #Senior #Educational

Shut Up and Play your Guitar.
-- Frank Zappa

#Guitar #Play #Shut Up

Music is the only religion that delivers the goods.
-- Frank Zappa

#Music Is #Goods

To me absurdity is the only reality
-- Frank Zappa

#Reality #Absurdity

A wise man once said, never discuss philosophy or politics in a disco environment.
-- Frank Zappa

#Wise #Philosophy #Men

Rock music was never written for or performed for conservative tastes.
-- Frank Zappa

#Rocks #Taste #Conservative

It's better to have something to remember than anything to regret.
-- Frank Zappa

#Regret #Remember

No change in musical style will survive unless it is accompanied by a change in clothing style. Rock is to dress up to.
-- Frank Zappa

#Change #Rocks #Musical

It gets harder the more you know. Because the more you find out the uglier everything seems.
-- Frank Zappa

#Knowledge #Harder

[Lighting a cigarette] Well, I'm not here to impinge on anybody else's lifestyle. If I'm in a place where I know I'm going to harm somebody's health or somebody asks me to please not smoke, I just go outside and smoke. But I do resent the way the nonsmoking mentality has been imposed on the smoking minority. Because, first of all, in a democracy, minorities do have rights. And, second, the whole pitch about smoking has gone from being a health issue to a moral issue, and when they reduce something to a moral issue, it has no place in any kind of legislation, as far as I'm concerned.
-- Frank Zappa

#Issues #Rights #Smoking