If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it.

So many books, so little time.

Interviewer: 'So Frank, you have long hair. Does that make you a woman?'Frank Zappa: 'You have a wooden leg. Does that make you a table?

The essence of Christianity is told us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, 'All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on. You could be in the Garden of Eden if you had just kept your fucking mouth shut and hadn't asked any questions.

Definition of rock journalism: People who can't write, doing interviews with people who can't think, in order to prepare articles for people who can't read.

Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.

Well, in this world of basic stereotyping, give a guy a big nose and some weird hair and he is capable of anything.

My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is: Keep him or her as far away from a church as you can.

There's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over.

Take the Kama Sutra. How many people died from the Kama Sutra as opposed to the Bible? Who wins?

If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.

Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read.

I think it is good that books still exist, but they do make me sleepy.

I never set out to be weird. It was always other people who called me weird.

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.

Republicans stand for raw, unbridled evil and greed and ignorance smothered in balloons and ribbons.

behind each breakaway movement is a breakaway demagogue who will set up his breakaway demagogue government.

I have an important message to deliver to all the cute people all over the world. If you're out there and you're cute, maybe you're beautiful. I just want to tell you somethin' — there's more of us UGLY MOTHERFUCKERS than you are, hey-y, so watch out.

Art is making something out of nothing, and selling it.

Information is not knowledge.Knowledge is not wisdom.Wisdom is not truth.Truth is not beauty.Beauty is not love.Love is not music.Music is THE BEST.

Jazz isn't dead. It just smells funny.

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.

The Ultimate Rule ought to be: 'If it sounds GOOD to you, it's bitchin'; if it sounds BAD to YOU, it's shitty. The more your musical experience, the easier it is to define for yourself what you like and what you don't like. American radio listeners, raised on a diet of _____ (fill in the blank), have experienced a musical universe so small they cannot begin to know what they like.

The rock and roll business is pretty absurd, but the world of serious music is much worse.

For the record, folks; I never took a shit on stage and the closest I ever came to eating shit anywhere was at a Holiday Inn buffet in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 1973.

I like to watch the news, because I don't like people very much and when you watch the news ... if you ever had an idea that people were really terrible, you could watch the news and know that you're right.

Well, I'm not here to impinge on anybody else's lifestyle. If I'm in a place where I know I'm going to harm somebody's health or somebody asks me to please not smoke, I just go outside and smoke. But I do resent the way the nonsmoking mentality has been imposed on the smoking minority. Because, first of all, in a democracy, minorities do have rights. And, second, the whole pitch about smoking has gone from being a health issue to a moral issue, and when they reduce something to a moral issue, it has no place in any kind of legislation, as far as I'm concerned.

The more you can escape from how horrible things really are, the less it's going to bother you...and then, the worse things get.

A drug is not bad. A drug is a chemical compound. The problem comes in when people who take drugs treat them like a license to behave like an asshole.

There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.

Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.

Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.

The United States is a nation of laws, badly written and randomly enforced.

I wrote a song about dental floss but did anyone's teeth get cleaner?

The Ultimate Rule ought to be: 'If it sounds GOOD to you, it's bitchin'; if it sounds BAD to YOU, it's shitty. The more your musical experience, the easier it is to define for yourself what you like and what you don't like.

There is more stupidity around than hydrogen and it has longer shelf life.