Top 100 Neil Young Quotes
#1. It's a blue album, but it's not a blues album. I'm not pretending all of a sudden now I'm blues.
Neil Young
#2. To protect our freedoms, it seems we're going to have to relinquish some of our freedoms for a short period of time.
Neil Young
#3. Without freedom of expression, good taste means nothing.
Neil Young
#5. I think in some ways - only in some ways - but in some ways, rock and roll has let me down. It really doesn't leave you a way to grow old gracefully and continue to work.
Neil Young
#6. My career is built around a pattern that just keeps repeating itself over and over again. There's nothing surprising about it at all. My changes are as easy to predict as the sun coming up and down.
Neil Young
#7. I totally have no other talent and I would be totally out of work if I did anything else.
Neil Young
#8. I've always been better moving than I am standing still.
Neil Young
#9. I'm not a preacher, and I'm certainly not a good example, but I have my own feelings about God. I'm kind of a nature guy. My cathedral is forests, or the prairies, or the beach.
Neil Young
#10. I dislike what has happened to the quality of the sound of music; there is little depth or feeling left, and people can't get what they need from listening to music anymore, so it is dying.
Neil Young
#11. Sailing heart-ships through broken harbors out on the waves of the night, still the searcher must ride the dark horse racing alone in his fright.
Neil Young
#12. You know, the future's a huge, gigantic place. I have no idea what's going on out there, I'm just going to walk into it and see what happens.
Neil Young
#13. I don't think I'm a thorn in the industry, I'm just another part of it.
Neil Young
#14. Southern change gonna come at last! Now your crosses are burning fast, Southern Man.
Neil Young
#15. Listen to your own voice. Don't listen to someone else's. To me the way to live is to always move forward - to keep searching for whatever it is that interests you.
Neil Young
#16. Ain't singing for Pepsi, ain't singing for Coke, I don't sing for nobody, makes me look like a joke.
Neil Young
#17. I'll go for things that I know are going to be wrong, with a vengeance
Neil Young
#18. Lust comes creeping through the night to feed on hearts of suburban wives who learned to pretend when they met their dreams end.
Neil Young
#19. When people start asking you to do the same thing over and over again, that's when you know you're way too close to something that you don't want to be near.
Neil Young
#20. The punches came fast and hard, lying on my back in the school yard.
Neil Young
#21. Remember when you used to watch TV in the Sixties and you'd see Perry Como in a cashmere sweater? That's what rock 'n' roll is becoming. It's your parents' music.
Neil Young
#22. I live for playing live. All my records are live, since After the Gold Rush, with the exception of Trans and the vocals on Landing on Water.
Neil Young
#23. There's two kinds of love, one is wrong and one is right.
Neil Young
#24. There's a lot of frustration in trying to get music out when you're the only one who hears it, especially if you have something in your head that's not normal.
Neil Young
#25. With Crazy Horse, it's all one big, growing, smoldering sound, and I'm part of it. It's like gliding, or some sort of natural surfing.
Neil Young
#26. My dad passed away ... and suddenly I found myself at the top of the tree and looking at the sky instead of at my mom and dad.
Neil Young
#27. Look at mother nature on the run in the 1970's.
Neil Young
#28. The rockets and the satellites, spaceships that we're creating now, we're pollinating the universe.
Neil Young
#29. What's female beauty, but an air divine, thro' which the mind's all gentle graces shine? They, like the sun, irradiate all between; the body charms because the soul is seen.
Neil Young
#30. True love opens the gates of time.
Neil Young
#31. The person who still blushes is not yet a degenerate.
Neil Young
#32. Keep on rockin' in the free world.
Neil Young
#34. I just wrote one song at a time. Kinda like an alcoholic. One day at a time.
Neil Young
#35. Now I'm livin' out here on the beach, but those seagulls are still out of reach.
Neil Young
#37. I love it when people yell at me about the environment and then I tell 'em I'm burning 90% cleaner than them.
Neil Young
#38. When I speak out on corporations hurting the common man or the environment or other species, I expect a well-financed disinformation campaign to be aimed my way.
Neil Young
#39. Without Pegi, I'm an island without an ocean
Neil Young
#40. The person who builds a character makes foes.
Neil Young
#41. As I get older, I get smaller. I see other parts of the world I didn't see before. Other points of view. I see outside myself more.
Neil Young
#42. Cocaine eyes won't hide your face.
Neil Young
#43. Being a musician enables a person to bend the notes and express things that are inside you, no matter what.
Neil Young
#44. Think I'll roll another number for the road
Neil Young
#45. There is some blogging jerk out there who feels he can generalize his way to validity.
Neil Young
#46. I don't force it. If you don't have an idea and you don't hear anything going over and over in your head, don't sit down and try to write a song. You know, go mow the lawn ... My songs speak for themselves.
Neil Young
#47. The Arabic states have to be integrated into the Iraqi reconstruction. We need the help of the Arabic community, which understands its culture. Americans arrive, invade, occupy.
Neil Young
#48. You have to be ready to give everything you have, and you have to make sure you've really got a lot to give. Because if ... you're not ready to give everything you have, ... then you're nothin'.
Neil Young
#49. I'm free to give my love, but you're not the one I'm thinking of.
Neil Young
#50. I do not trust self-serving misinformation coming from corporations and their media trolls. I do not trust politicians who are taking millions from those corporations, either. I trust people. So I make my music for people, not for candidates.
Neil Young
#51. It's all very hazy to me now. I'm glad I made it through that stage. It got a little dicey. There were some drugs going on. I remember singing one song for about a day and a half.
Neil Young
#52. We have a thousand points of light for the homeless man. We've got a kinder gentler machine gun hand.
Neil Young
#53. Something comes along and you have to jump on and do it. You can't stop until it's done.
Neil Young
#54. Hate was just a legend
And war was never known
The people worked together
And they lifted many stones.
They carried them to the flatlands
And they died along the way
But they built up with their bare hands
What we still can't do today.
Neil Young
#55. I see country music, I see people who take care of their own. You've got 75 year-old guys on the road. That's what I was put here to do, y'know, so I wanna make sure I surround myself with people who are gonna take care of me. 'Cause I'm in it for the long run.
Neil Young
#56. Learning from other people is what music is all about.
Neil Young
#57. I'm not waiting for times to change
I want to live like a free-roaming soul
on the highway of our love.
Neil Young
#58. Ten silver saxes, a bass with a bow, the drummer relaxes in between shows with his cinnamon girl.
Neil Young
#59. Most people think it's the other way around: that time is going faster and we're doing less. But really time seems to be going faster because we're cramming so much into it.
Neil Young
#60. I'll never be Bob Dylan. He's the master.
Neil Young
#61. I'm not the same as I was long ago, I've learned some new things and I hope that it shows.
Neil Young
#62. When we were strangers, I liked you from afar
when we were lovers, I loved you with all my heart
Neil Young
#63. As soon as you start talking about mystique, you have none.
Neil Young
#64. It's the woman in you that makes you want to play this game.
Neil Young
#65. As you go through life, you've got to see the valleys as well as the peaks.
Neil Young
#66. Though we rush ahead to save our time, we are only what we feel
Neil Young
#68. Possessions and concessions are not often what they seem, they drag you down and load you down in disguise of security.
Neil Young
#69. I don't think that one day really relates to the next day in life.
Neil Young
#70. The '60s was one of the first times the power of music was used by a generation to bind them together.
Neil Young
#71. I don't know if I'll find the cinnamon girl. I think I already did, but I'm still singing, who knows.
Neil Young
#72. I was just 20 years old when I wrote Broken Arrow.
Neil Young
#73. Lyndon Johnson bared his scars, American ... stars 'n bars.
Neil Young
#74. One good thing about the past is that you can't change it. So there's no reason to go back. It's there. It is what it is. The only thing you can change is right now and what's happening next.
Neil Young
#75. Corporations don't have children. They don't have feelings or souls. They don't depend on uncontaminated water, clean air, or healthy food to survive. They are beholden to one thing - the bottom line.
Neil Young
#76. It doesn't mean that much to me to mean that much to you.
Neil Young
#77. Our educational system basically strives for normal-which is too bad. Sometimes the exceptional is classified as abnormal and pushed aside.
Neil Young
#78. I want to live, I want to give, I've been a miner for a heart of gold.
Neil Young
#79. If you follow every dream, you might get lost.
Neil Young
#80. Most pleasures, like flowers when gathered die.
Neil Young
#81. Give a hippie too much money and anything can happen.
Neil Young
#82. The thing about my music is, there really is no point.
Neil Young
#83. You are like a hurricane, there's calm in your eyes, and I'm getting blown away.
Neil Young
#84. And as an afterthought, this too must be told: Some people have taken pure bullshit and turned it into gold.
Neil Young
#85. Southern man better keep your head, don't forget what your good book says.
Neil Young
#86. Every wave is new until it breaks.
Neil Young
#87. The way in which the USA and Great Britain delivered Iraq to the Iraqis, the way and means that this played out, that is the endgame.
Neil Young
#88. I like it if people enjoy what I'm doing, but if they don't, I also like it. I sometimes really like aggravating people with what I do. I think it's good for them.
Neil Young
#89. Commitments are one of the worst things to have in the music business. They're very annoying.
Neil Young
#90. Starts out slow and then fizzles out altogether.
Neil Young
#91. Everybody seems to wonder what it's like down here. I gotta get away from this day-to-day running around. Everybody knows this is nowhere.
Neil Young
#92. Don't let it bring you down. It's only castles burning, find someone who's turning, and you will come around.
Neil Young
#93. My life is not a political campaign. I just write about what is on my mind. I just play whatever I feel like playing. Whatever is in my soul at the time is what I want to do. I have, thank god, enough people who are still interested in what I am doing so that I can go out and keep doing it.
Neil Young
#95. People who agree with you already agree with you
you don't change peoples minds.
Neil Young
#96. I have so many opinions about everything it just comes out during my music. It's a battle for me. I try not to be preachy. That's a real danger.
Neil Young
#97. Was he a doper or was he just a loser?
Neil Young
#98. When I first tried out some hash, smoked some then. And I'll do it again, if only I had some cash.
Neil Young
#99. I go in and sing the song and arrange it and mix it and that's it. It's no different than playing in clubs.
Neil Young
#100. In my life I have had various health threats: polio, seizures, a brain aneurysm. None of these things has really changed me much, although it is hard to say for sure. These are events that are part of my life. They make me who I am. I am thankful for them. They are scary.
Neil Young
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