Dave Brubeck Quotes

God put me on this earth to bring souls back to the Kingdom of God. You don't need to pray ten times a day - you just need hope. My music is going to stop war; it's the healing music. I see myself in Brazil, in Syria, in Darfur, and places where they really need hope.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

Well, you know, I was through the whole of the Second World War and saw all my friends killed.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Music is the biggest tool of revolution - the best way to reach out to the youth and involve them. If you can't contribute to the world with your art, I don't see the meaning of life.

Sin is, somehow, at the root of all human misery. Sin is what keeps us from God and from life. It is in the face of every battered woman, the cry of every neglected child, the despair of every addict, the death of every victim of every war.

Then somebody suggested I should write about the war, and I said I didn't know anything about the war. I did not understand anything about it. I didn't see how I could write it.

In war, people find themselves in extraordinary circumstances, and in those circumstances, they act in extraordinary ways. In war, you see people at their very best and their very worst, acting in ways you could never imagine. War is human drama at its most epic and most intense.

The Bible is a novel that's crazy... it has murder, it has victory it has mayhem, it has disaster, it has war, sanctification.

War does horrible things to human beings, to societies. It brings out the best, but most often the worst, in our human nature.

The funny thing about war is that people feel you need to be morally outraged. I feel morally outraged about it, and I've been doing it for long enough to feel morally outraged, because I have been in massacre scenes in West Africa, and I've been doing this for a long time now.

Religion is interesting because it brings out the best and the worst in humanity. It can be a source of good deeds, whether it's people from different spiritual backgrounds coming together to help other people in need after a crisis. But it's also a cause for war and bloodshed.

The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships.

“Never again” has become our battle cry.

Make my skin into drumheads for the Bohemian cause.

Can't he understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?

This world has need of song and sword.

I wanna rhyme about God.

I'm from England, and like every other great empire who stole bits of the world, there is a price to pay. And I was born in 1935. So, since I've been conscious of the world, I've either been in, or been on the periphery of, a war zone.

I grew up singing in church. I've been doing that since I was 3 years old. Singing was a blessing for me to do.

I have never been in a war before, but I have seen famine and death. I was asking (myself) what do they feel when they do this? I don't understand it. They are all children of God. Why do they do it. I don't understand.

Fathers, I do not practice. I'm not religious in life, but when I perform "The Creation of the World" and when my soul is touched by the confrontation of "Good and Evil," then God enters in me.

The music of the Gospel leads us home.

News footage came on the TV during dinner of bloody bodies coming back from battle in Vietnam, or the race riots in the South, people getting hosed in Selma, Alabama, or the Biafra war, where I got my name. In my household, it was explained and discussed with the children, as a way of educating us from when we first started grade school why racism and war were wrong, what this all really means.

I am totally against the war but violence is part of mankind and it's going to happen, but as musicians I think we've got to step up and say 'come on'.