The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Laws bind us. But it is important to remember the law is only what is popular. Not what's right or wrong.
—Marilyn Manson
How come you can hear a chord, and then another chord, and then your heart breaks open?
—Anne Lamott
Because of her singing they all went away feeling moved, feeling comforted, feeling, perhaps, the slightest tremors of faith.
—Ann Patchett
There is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the Lord. . . . I have never seen anything to equal the fire and excitement that sometimes, without warning, fill a church, causing the church, as Leadbelly and so many others have testified, to "rock.
—James Baldwin
There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something, we'd all love one another.
—Frank Zappa
I've always held the song in high regard because songs have got me through so many sinks of dishes and so many humiliating courting events.
—Leonard Cohen
Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music.
—Angela Monet
Aldous Huxley suggested that the psalm-singing of Christian and Buddhist monks, the chanting of medicine men and shamans, and the shouting and screaming of revivalists for hours on end bring about an increase in the carbon-dioxide level, triggering an altered state.
—James Alcock
Everything too stupid to be said is sung.
—Voltaire
I wrote a song, but I can't read music, so I don't know what it is. Every once in a while I'll be listening to the radio, and I say, "I think I might have written that.
—Steven Wright
I'd rather be dead than singing "Satisfaction" when I'm forty-five.
—From a 1975 interview with Mick Jagger, who still performs the song at age sixty-seven
I can't stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession, let alone two years or ten years. If you can, then it ain't music, it's close-order drill or exercise or yodeling or something, not music.
—Billie Holiday
A religious life is a struggle and not a hymn.
—Madame de Stael
The Qabalists believed that the universe was created from sound. Thus by reciting sacred sounds, changes or transformations of matter could take place. Healing could simply consist of reinvoking those sacred sounds in the body. . . . Perhaps this is what the shamans do when they chant.
—Fred Alan Wolf