Edward V. Long Quotes

Every time the industry gets powerful, and corporate thinking dominates what the music is, then the music really pales.

Ordinary men live in fear all the time. Didn't you know that? We're afraid of the weather, we're afraid of powerful men, we're afraid of the night and the monsters that lurk in the dark, we're afraid of growing old and of dying. Sometimes we're even afraid of living. Ordinary men are afraid almost every minute of their lives.

Most people believe in God because they have been taught from early infancy to do it, and that is the main reason. Then I think that the next most powerful reason is the wish for safety.

n the dark everyone felt the same: the edges blurred. When I think of myself then, what I was like two years ago, I feel like a wound in a bad place, prone to be bumped on corners or edges. Never able to heal.

I think essentially corrupting institutions in Washington are turning conservatism into something that is really very creepy, but also emotionally and psychically powerful for people.

I think we need to find out why the citizens of the world's wealthiest, most envied, most powerful country are so cynical, so distressed, so angry, so ticked of about so many things.

I think now that being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligation but being able to love. To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free.

I think that a lot of social movements, political movements, powerful ones - certainly they form, collectively, an idea of the truth which becomes hard to question. It becomes a dogma, and from the inside it starts to look like common sense.

The character is what trips you up - the thing of, "I'm going to get so dark in this character that I'm going to get lost in a character." You can't get lost in a character. You can only think you're lost in a character.

When you look at things like social media, that's an immensely powerful tool that I'm all in favor of. I think it's amazing. It's a powerful tool, and it's one that we're, as a species, still grappling with learning to use. It's like we've grown an extra tail and we inadvertently lash out and knock over all of the furniture.

I think that the dark side of MFA programs is that they're generating more poets than the culture can absorb and there are more people writing poetry than possibly read it or can certainly earn a living around it.

The fact is that you can be a Nazi living in a little trailer in the middle of Montana and as awful as everything you stand for is, you're basically an angry guy in a shack. Scientology, on the other hand, is a multi-billion dollar institution with tentacles that reach into lots of countries. I don't think it's as powerful as many people think it is, but compared to the sorts of people I've dealt with, it is a force to be reckoned with. It has global influence and very very deep pockets.

I think that's a powerful thing, to be able to engage your audience and let them put some of themselves into the music.

It is often said that in today's modern and postmodern world that the forces of darkness are upon us. But I think not; in the Dark and the Deep there are truths that can always heal. It is not the forces of darkness but of shallowness that everywhere threaten the true, and the good, and the beautiful, and that ironically announce themselves as deep and profound. It is an exuberant and fearess shallowness that everywhere is the modern danger, the modern threat, and that everywhere nonetheless calls to us as savior.

I think that too far, too much, to a greater degree than is anywhere near appropriate, America and our politics are being governed by more and more powerful interests, by fewer and fewer people in the sense of the amount of money that has controlled access and other kinds of things.

Akhnaten is kind of a dark, kind of mysterious character. We don't know a lot about him - a lot of information on him was lost. But he obviously was a kind of iconoclast of him time. I guess I'm attracted to people like that. Like [Albert] Einstein also, who radically changed our way of thinking about the world we live in.

I think the greedy corporate owners have to be confronted with the fact that they are ignoring their most powerful resource - their workers.

Thinking about dark and troublesome things, wondering when they'll come to pay you a visit, turns out to be the very best way to call them to your side.

I think the trick of being a writer is to basically put your cards out there all the time and be willing to be as in the dark about what happens next as your reader would be at that time. And then you can really surprise yourself. There's that cliche, "No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader!"

I sometimes talk to people who think I got published because I was an editor, or because I was an agent, and I have to disabuse them of that notion. It wasn't because of my emplacement within the industry. Actually the writing came first, and the publishing came first as well.

By...WWII, I.G. Farben had become...part of the most gigantic and powerful cartel of all history...interlocking agreements...over 2,000 of them...In the US, the cartel had established important agreements with

I think one of the things I always loved about the comics was this idea that this character, when he goes berserk, that white, blind rage makes him incredibly powerful, but it's also a great flaw. It's almost like he loses consciousness of what he's doing. During that he can do great damage.

I don't think [Dylan and the Beatles] influenced me a lot. I think it was inevitable; they were so powerful that you couldn't really escape the influence.

I think we, especially in American culture, are so afraid to talk about death. And I'm not talking about literal death. I'm talking about shedding skin. I'm talking about rebirth, ultimately, and how we continue to change as human beings and continue to grow. There's that great Henry Miller quote, "All growth is a leap in the dark."

If you want to - if you want to engage in conspiracy theories that the White House and the vice president intended no one to ever know - like "The New York Times" - we would have been kept in the dark forever. I just think that's completely irrational.