Roger Waters Quotes: Roger Waters was born on September 6, 1943, in Great Bookham, Surrey, England. His father, Eric Fletcher Waters, was a schoolteacher and a veteran of World War II. Waters showed an early interest in music and received formal music training on the piano and clarinet.
Roger Waters Quotes
- “The whole point of art, as far as I’m concerned, is that art doesn’t make any difference. And that’s why it’s important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they’re not real.”
- “We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl, year after year.”
- “If you want to find out what’s wrong with society, go look at what art is doing, what the music is doing and what movies are doing.”
- “The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules. It’s people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages.”
- “The only thing that’s going to bring peace to the world is a change in our own consciousness, and the way we perceive the world.”
- “To live is to fly, low and high.”
- “The trick is, if you listen to that music and you see me, you’re not getting anything out of it. If you listen to that music and you see yourself, it will probably make you cry and you’ll learn something about yourself and now you’re getting something out of it.”
- “The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it’s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues.”
- “I believe in love, but not that sort of love. I believe that love lies at the heart of everything.”
- “We don’t need no education. We don’t need no thought control.”
- “If you want to be good at anything, you have to work hard at it. That doesn’t mean you can’t have a hell of a good time doing it.”
- “People, they think great, great thoughts. And they do great, great things. But all they are is the unconscious expression of the society in which they live.”
- “The power of art is that it can actually bring people together, and in so doing, it can do things that politics can’t.”
- “I’m not frightened of dying. Any time will do, I don’t mind. Why should I be frightened of dying? There’s no reason for it—you’ve gotta go sometime.”
- “The ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
- “Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?”
- “Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.”
- “Every struggle, every war, every fist that’s clenched is trying to create an ideal world.”
- “It doesn’t matter if we all die.”
- “I have no problem with my anger, I’m totally in touch with it. I use it as fuel. I don’t think I would be as passionate about what I do if I didn’t have the anger. I wouldn’t be able to put so much into it if it wasn’t for the anger.”
- “We all have a dark side. Most of us go through life avoiding direct confrontation with that aspect of ourselves, which I call the shadow self. There’s a reason why. It carries a great deal of energy.”
- “It’s important to look at the world and see it for what it is, but also to imagine what it might be.”
- “The power of art is to get people to start talking, thinking, and questioning things.”
- “I’m not interested in being a rock star. I’m interested in being a human being.”
- “Art is a constant battle to bring order out of chaos.”
- “If you want to change the world, start by changing yourself.”
- “We’re all puppets, Laurie. I’m just a puppet who can see the strings.”
- “Sometimes the people who know the least about you end up being the ones to judge you the most.”
- “The walls we build around ourselves to keep out the sadness also keep out the joy.”
- “The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.”
- “War does not determine who is right, only who is left.”
- “You have to find a way of challenging the lies that are told about you without descending to the level of your antagonists.”
- “You have to make yourself a lightning rod for the truth. You have to be somebody who’s willing to be ridiculed and maligned and misunderstood.”
- “The mind plays tricks on you. You play tricks back! It’s like you’re unraveling a big cable-knit sweater that someone keeps knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting…”
- “There’s an opportunity when we come together to actually try and change the world for the better. That’s what art can do.”
- “Our work is never over. The struggle continues.”
- “Everyday life is full of emptiness. Empty people, empty jobs, empty thoughts.”
- “I have always been a conflicted character. I’ve always had that dark side, and that’s why I needed to make music. I needed to make music to channel that aggression, that hostility into something useful.”
- “When you’re young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You’re your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don’t yet know about the habit they have of coming back.”
- “In the end, we’re all just ordinary men.”
