Quotes By Jerry Garcia

It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness.

Live life expecting the worst, hoping for the best, and living for the future!

To me, that's the key thing, the pursuit of happiness. That's the basic, ultimate freedom.

If we had any nerve at all, if we had any real balls as a society, or whatever you need, whatever quality you need, real character, we would make an effort to really address the wrongs in this society, righteously.

Truth is something you stumble into when you think you're going someplace else.

Nothing left to do but smile.

Stuff that's hidden and murky and ambiguous is scary because you don't know what it does.

I mean, just because you're a musician doesn't mean all your ideas are about music. So every once in a while I get an idea about plumbing, I get an idea about city government, and they come the way they come.

We're not uncomfortable with it, and we've already been through enough of the music business where I'm not really worried that commercial success is going to in some way - we're already past saving, you know what I mean? It's too late for us.

I listen to anything anyone gives me. I always go back to a few basic favorites. I can always listen to Django Reinhardt and hear something I haven't heard before. I like to listen to Art Tatum and Coltrane and Charlie Parker. Those are guys who never seem to run out of ideas.

But audio is a component of video, so there's always been that anyway, and although we've never expressed a visual side apart from the Grateful Dead movie, I don't find it that remote, you know what I mean? It's a departure of sorts, but it's like a first cousin.

We're like licorice. Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.

You need music, I don't know why. It's probably one of those Joe Campbell questions, why we need ritual. We need magic, and bliss, and power, myth, and celebration and religion in our lives, and music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it.

We didn't invent the Grateful Dead, the crowd invented the Grateful Dead. We were just in line to see what was going to happen.

I'd rather have my immortality while I'm alive. I don't care if it lasts beyond me at all. I'd just as soon it didn't.

Magic is what we do, music is how we do it.

You can't just play the way The Grateful Dead plays without working at it. It's not something that is easy or just happened to us. There was a long, slow process that brought that into being.

What we're thinking about is a peaceful planet. We're not thinking about anything else. We're not thinking about any kind of power. We're not thinking about any kind of struggles. We're not thinking about revolution or war or any of that. That's not what we want. Nobody wants to get hurt. Nobody wants to hurt anybody. We would all like to be able to live an uncluttered life. A simple life, a good life. And think about moving the whole human race ahead a step, or a few steps.

Somebody has to do something (to stop the unharnessed defoliation), and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.

America is still mostly xenophobic and racist. That's the nature of America, I think.