Top 170 Quotes & Sayings by Jerry Garcia

If we had any nerve at all, if we had any real balls as a society, or whatever you need, whatever quality you need, real character, we would make an effort to really address the wrongs in this society, righteously.

And the live show is still our main thing.

My guitar is a mutation between a classic Fender Stratocaster guitar, which I played for years, and a Gibson solid-body like an SG or a Les Paul. It contains all sounds of the basic classic rock n' roll guitars. It does what I want it to do.

I mean, just because you're a musician doesn't mean all your ideas are about music. So every once in a while I get an idea about plumbing, I get an idea about city government, and they come the way they come.

And there's a lot of that stuff with people bringing their kids, kids bringing their parents, people bringing their grandparents - 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.

I read somewhere that 77 per cent of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I'm more intrigued by the 23 per cent who are apparently doing quite well for themselves.

The process of selecting the tone on the guitar is an aesthetic process like any other, so you try a lot of different things.

I'm not trying to clock scores in this lifetime, it's just that things are better now than they were like five, ten years ago. Music has gotten a lot better. There's a lot of people who are committed to - soulfully.

I don't think that Slaughterhouse-Five was successful movie material. In fact, Vonnegut's books mostly I don't feel are movie material.

My kids seem to be more mature and older than I am now somehow. They've gotten ahead of me somehow. But they're very patient with me.

But hey, when you live in Watts, you need a little smack to get by, you know what I mean? You need something soft and comfortable in your life, 'cause you're not going to get it from what's around you. And society isn't going to give it to you.

I have all the patience in the world about Sirens. For me it's not a Grateful Dead project, it's a Me project.

But audio is a component of video, so there's always been that anyway, and although we've never expressed a visual side apart from the Grateful Dead movie, I don't find it that remote, you know what I mean? It's a departure of sorts, but it's like a first cousin.

For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part.

I listen to anything anyone gives me. I always go back to a few basic favorites. I can always listen to Django Reinhardt and hear something I haven't heard before. I like to listen to Art Tatum and Coltrane and Charlie Parker. Those are guys who never seem to run out of ideas.

And for me there's still more material than 20 lifetimes that I can use up.

Yeah, I think we have to. If we want our shows to be - if we want the quality of the shows to be good, and we want the energy to be high, and if we want to be in good enough physical shape to do them, and not exhaust ourselves on the road, and not get stale, we have to pace.

What we do is as American as lynch mobs. America has always been a complex place.

I don't wake up in the morning and say, 'Jeez, I feel great today. I think I'll write a song.' I mean, anything is more interesting to me than writing a song. It's like, 'I think I'd like to write a song... No, I guess I better go feed the cat first.' You know what I mean? It's like pulling teeth. I don't enjoy it a bit.

I'm shopping around for something to do that no one will like.

Stuff that's hidden and murky and ambiguous is scary because you don't know what it does.

I don't know why, it's the same reason why you like some music and you don't like others. There's something about it that you like. Ultimately I don't find it's in my best interests to try and analyze it, since it's fundamentally emotional.

So we are pretty convinced we don't want to play huge stadiums unless we can play them well.

And as far as I'm concerned, it's like I say, drugs are not the problem. Other stuff is the problem.

Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.

Hunter can write a melody and stuff like that, but his forte is lyrics. He can write a serviceable melody to hang his lyrics on, and sometimes he comes up with something really nice.

So it's one of those things where we have to - our problem is pacing ourselves and still reaching a large enough number of our audience. Because we don't want to burn the audience. And we don't want to be excluding anybody.

I think it's too bad that everybody's decided to turn on drugs, I don't think drugs are the problem. Crime is the problem. Cops are the problem. Money's the problem. But drugs are just drugs.

We're not uncomfortable with it, and we've already been through enough of the music business where I'm not really worried that commercial success is going to in some way - we're already past saving, you know what I mean? It's too late for us.

I don't think I've ever actually written from inspiration, actually had a song just go, 'Bing!' I only recall that happening to me twice - once was with 'Terrapin' and the other was 'Wharf Rat.' I mean, that's twice in a lifetime of writing!

I mean, whatever kills you kills you, and your death is authentic no matter how you die.

America is still mostly xenophobic and racist. That's the nature of America, I think.

I have one custom guitar which I play almost exclusively. I have others - sometimes you want a little texture, kind of a different sound or something.

Death comes at you no matter what you do in this life, and to equate drugs with death is a facile comparison.

And Warner Bros. seems to be pretty much into re-releasing all of their catalog. So there's the Warner Bros. stuff and the stuff that we have control over, we're gradually re-releasing it. Some stuff we don't have control over.

Our strong suit is what we do, and our audience.

The alternate media are becoming important and viable alternatives to playing live. Records, videos, that kind of thing. They're going to start to count for something. Because there's only a limited amount of us-time available to us.

I equate Deadheads to people that like black licorice. There aren't many people that like black licorice, but the ones that do, REALLY REALLY like it! Or buttermilk, or whatever.

Truth is something you stumble into when you think you're going someplace else.

The great thing is the thing of being able to see things through many points of view. That's enlarging. I mean, it saves you from ultimately from the boredom of having one point of view, like being locked in a room with nothing but your own point of view, your own references.

What we're thinking about is a peaceful planet. We're not thinking about anything else. We're not thinking about any kind of power. We're not thinking about any kind of struggles. We're not thinking about revolution or war or any of that. That's not what we want. Nobody wants to get hurt. Nobody wants to hurt anybody. We would all like to be able to live an uncluttered life. A simple life, a good life. And think about moving the whole human race ahead a step, or a few steps.

Nothing left to do but smile.

Sometimes the lights all shining on me, other times I can barely see. Lately it occurs to me what a long strange trip it's been.

It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness.

To me, that's the key thing, the pursuit of happiness. That's the basic, ultimate freedom.

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

Too much of a good thing is just about right

You don't want to be the best at what you do, you want to be the only one.

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

If you're able to enjoy something, to devote your life to it or a reasonable amount of time and energy, it will work out for you.

Live life expecting the worst, hoping for the best, and living for the future!

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.

The nature of what we're doing is something, which is by its very nature, is non-formulaic. There's no way that you can make it happen by intention alone. It's something that you have to sort of allow it to happen, and you have to allow for it to happen.

To get really high is to forget yourself. And to forget yourself is to see everything else. And to see everything else is to become an understanding molecule in evolution, a conscious tool of the universe.

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

Magic is what we do, music is how we do it.

I Don't Think There's A Good Excuse For Being Unhappy. I'm Not Particularly Unhappy, But I Know What Pain Is. I think That Life Is Characterized By Pain, Partly. Part Of The Way You Can Tell You're Alive Is By How Much Pain You're Experiencing, Or How Little.

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

All I know is, if you listen to society, you'll never get anywhere!

If the thunder don't get ya then the lightning will.