Nick Lowe Quotes

There are thus great swathes of the past where understanding is more important and reputable than judgement, because the principal actors performed in line with the ideas and values of that time, not of ours.

I guess I'm concerned that vulgarity has now officially entered the mainstream of our culture, and I think people have to respectfully stand up and say, 'No thanks.'

It's true that what is morbid is highly valued today, and so you may think that I am only joking or that I've devised just one more means of praising Art with the help of irony.

Whether or not regime change is a good idea or a bad idea. I don't think because I think the regime change was a bad idea it means that Hussein was necessarily a good idea.

There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends.

Within a social structure, a familial structure, or a cultural structure of various kinds, there is a substitute for actual freedom. I mean, actual freedom is a very abstract notion; we have no idea what it means, except within a context - freedom to do what? So within these social structures, freedom becomes defined as power, your ability to make choices, and the power relationship within a family, any family.

I mean it wasn't that they sat around thinking oh gosh I needed more choices in my grocery stores the way I had come to think about it as an American growing up.

Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence.

I imagine that as contemporary music goes on changing in the way that I'm changing it what will be done is to more and more completely liberate sounds from abstract ideas about them and more and more exactly to let them be physically uniquely themselves. This means for me: knowing more and more not what I think a sound is but what it actually is in all of its acoustical details and then letting this sound exist, itself, changing in a changing sonorous environment.

We need to define what culture is. Every human being lives within a culture, and culture means "To grow in." It means to literally fall, and this is exactly what I believe is happening all around us right now.

You come out into the world after a season of TV and you're just swearing and saying mean things to people and they're looking at you like, Who are you? And oh yeah, you think, I have to reacclimate to the way people genuinely treat each other.

My ideas flow so rapidly that I have not time to express them──by which means my letters sometimes convey no ideas at all to my correspondents.

I think the policy makers like the idea of being the boss. I mean people who like to boss other people around like to go into politics so they can become the boss.

Anxious. Intriguing word. It literally means, "to be divided" or "distracted." It conveys the idea of being so mentally ill at ease that you cannot do what you need to do because you are so distracted in your thinking.

Affirmations are quality ideas and quality thoughts. The quality of our thoughts reflects the quality of our life. Hence, if we were to raise the quality of our thoughts, we would automatically improve the quality of our life Affirmation literally means to validate or confirm. So when we think a thought over and over again, we are validating or confirming it as the truth Using affirmations on a daily basis is one of the easiest things we can do to change our lives.

I think for it to be hip to be idealistic is weird, you know? I mean, even all the best rebels to me, had some sense of hope in them.

I don't personally feel any association with a kind of culture related to state, or culture related to power, which I think is always disgusting.

I think that a society cannot live without a certain number of irrational beliefs. They are protected from criticism and analysis because they are irrational.

There is a cultural taste which tries very hard to get rid of the lice in a fur coat. There is another which tolerates the lice and thinks the coat can be worn with them in it. And finally there is a taste which regards the lice as the most important thing about the coat and consequently places the coat at the lice's disposal.

Here, waltzes are called works! And Strauss and Lanner, who play them for dancing, are called Kapellmeistern. This does not mean that everyone thinks like that; indeed, nearly everyone laughs about it; but only waltzes get printed.

At this moment, I don't think people would back the old-fashioned Marxist-Leninist ideas of FARC. But I do hope that the rebels will continue to pursue their agenda by legal means and not through violence.

Writing is a conversation with reading; a dialogue with thinking. All conversations with older people contain repetition. Some of the ideas mean a lot to me, just interesting, so I both embrace and attack the ideas because I found them, well, delightful.

I mean just look at haiku, the idea of it. We want to focus on that singularity, on that simplicity, but we still want to add features and add value, but we want to do it in a way that fits in with that mentality of simplicity. You have to spend a lot of time thinking about it.

The idea of a commonwealth relationship is alien to most people but I think that's true generally.

Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.