"…we live in a kind of society which breeds criminals like rabbits. A society that worships money, and yet deprives so many people of it. A society that advertises and exalts homes, automobiles, Caribbean trips, color television, and a million other possessions, and yet has not been able to organize its enormous wealth so as to give everybody a job and an income sufficient to get the things they want. A society that wastes hundreds of billions of dollars on instruments of death, that condones official violence on a mass scale, and then punishes individual violence on a small scale."

"How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?"

"By chance, Jimi Hendrix came up the stairs and found me sitting there like some hick wallflower and grinned. He had to catch a plane to London to do the Isle of Wight Festival. When I told him I was too chicken to go in, he laughed softly and said that contrary to what people think, he was shy, and parties made him nervous. He spent a little time with me on the stairs and told me his vision of what he wanted to do with the studio. He dreamed of amassing musicians from all over the world in Woodstock and they would sit in a field in a circle and play and play. It didn’t matter what key or tempo or what melody, they would keep on playing through their discordance until they found a common language . Eventually they would record this abstract universal language of music in his new studio.

‘The language of peace. You dig?’ I did.

I can’t remember if I actually went into the studio, but Jimi never accomplished his dream."

"History does not offer us predictable scenarios for immense changes in consciousness and policy. Such changes have taken place, but always in ways that could not be foretold, starting often with imperceptibly small acts, developing along routes too complex to trace. All we can do is to make a start, wherever we can, to persist, and let events unfold as they will. On our side are colossal forces. There is the desire for survival of 5 billion people. There are the courage and energy of the young, once their adventurous spirit is turned toward the ending of war rather than the waging of war, creation rather than destruction, and world friendship rather than hatred of those on the other side of the national boundaries. There are artists and musicians, poets and actors in every land who are ready to take the world musical and eloquent and beautiful for all of us, if we give them the chance. They, perhaps more than anyone, know what we are missing by our infatuation with violence. They also know the power of the imagination and can help us to reach the hearts and souls of people everywhere."