Frank Zappa Quotations | Page 2

I think love lyrics have contributed to the general aura of bad mental health in America.

Don't go to bed with any woman crazier than you are.

Did you ever consider that LSD was really one of the most dangerous drugs ever manufactured because the people who took it turned into yuppies?

Books Are Good For Lots Of Uses, Not For Dropping In The Toilet.

One size does not fit all.

So many books, so little time.

The price of meat has just gone up and your old lady has just gone down.

Anything Anytime Anyplace For No Reason At All (or AAAFNRAA)

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.

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

If your children ever find out how lame you really are, they'll murder you in your sleep.

Anyone who is disturbed by the idea of newts in a nightclub is potentially dangerous.

Don't eat the yellow snow.

Without "Louie Louie" a symphony is not quite so grand.

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

I think it's really tragic when people get serious about stuff. It's such an absurdity to take anything really seriously ... I make an honest attempt not to take anything seriously: I worked that attitude out about the time I was eighteen, I mean, what does it all mean when you get right down to it, what's the story here? Being alive is so weird.

There is no hell, there's only France

The typical rock fan is not smart enough to know when he is being dumped on.

The crux of the biscuit is the apostrophe!

I would say that today, dishonesty is the rule, and honesty the exception. It could be, statistically, that more people are honest than dishonest, but the few that really control things are not honest, and that tips the balance.

People make a lot of fuss about my kids having such supposedly 'strange names', but the fact is that no matter what first names I might have given them, it is the last name that is going to get them in trouble.

Mr. Gorbachev has apparently stumbled onto one of the best-kept secrets in recent Soviet history: Communism doesn't work.

Maybe you should stay with your mama, you're kind of stupid and ugly, too.

She lives in Mojave in a Winnebago. His name is Bobby, he looks like a potato.

He took a dog-doo snow cone and stuffed it in my right eye. He took a dog-doo snow cone and stuffed it in my other eye.

While your children are sleeping, your puppy is crappin'.

Broken hearts are for assholes, are you an asshole?

He wants to do you in cause the color of your skin.

I am the slime oozing out from your TV set. You will obey me while I lead you, and eat the garbage while I feed you.

Only thirteen, and she knows how to nasty.

Studied law, but not qualified to practice it.

I think the anti-smoking business is a yuppie invention-an extension of the concept that "we'll always be young, rich, and healthy.

Do we really want to know how Michael Jackson makes his music? No. We want to understand why he needs the bones of the Elephant Man -- and, until he tells us, it doesn't make too much difference whether or not he really is ''bad.

The most abundant element in the Universe is stupidity

Guitar playing, as currently understood, has more to do with sports than it does to do with music. It's an Olympic challenge type of situation. The challenges are in the realm of speed, redundancy, choreography, and grooming... ...clouds of educated gnat-notes.

I'm the best you can get. Have you guessed me yet? I'm the slime oozin' out from your TV set!

If you pick up a guitar and it says, 'take me, I'm yours,' then that's the one for you

The language and concepts contained herein are guaranteed not to cause eternal torment in the place where the guy with the horns and pointed stick conducts his business

It is always advisable to be a loser if you cannot become a winner

Jazz is the music of unemployment.

I don't want to spend my life explaining myself. You either get it, or you don't.

Elmore James only knew one lick, but you had the feeling that he meant it.

Asked random questions about the First Amendment and how they would like to have it applied, if you believe in polls at all, the average American wants no part of it. But if you ask, 'What if we threw the Constitution away tomorrow?' the answer is 'No, that would be bad!' But living under the Constitution is another story altogether.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Politics Is the Entertainment Branch of Industry. C-SPAN's coverage of governmental proceedings is wonderful. Caution! Buffoons on the Hill! Wallowing in blabber and spew, regiments of ex-lawyers and used-car salesmen attempt to distract us from the naughty little surprises served up by deregulated corporate America.

With a tongue like a cow, she could make you go wow.

They tried to make me go to Catholic school, too. I lasted a very short time. When the penguin came after me with a ruler, I was out of there.

Information doesn't kill you.

You've got to be digging it while it's happening 'cause it just might be a one shot deal.

Whatever you have to do to have a good time, let's get on with it, so long as it doesn't cause a murder.

Well Mike, I'm abnormal.

If we cannot be free, we can at least be cheap

People are just waiting around to get certified

Never bend over for a Christian.

The lifestyle that I have is probably neither desirable nor useful to most people.

I believe that people have a right to decide their own destinies; people own themselves. I also believe that, in a democracy, government exists because (and only so long as) individual citizens give it a temporary license to exist, in exchange for a promise that it will behave itself. In a democracy, you own the government. It doesn't own you.

The establishment of a rating system, voluntary or otherwise, opens the door to an endless parade of moral quality control programs based on things certain Christians do not like. What if the next bunch of Washington wives demands a large yellow J on all material written or performed by Jews, in order to save helpless children from exposure to concealed Zionist doctrine?

Bad facts make bad law, and people who write bad laws are in my opinion more dangerous than songwriters who celebrate sexuality.

The last election just laid the foundation of the next 500 years of Dark Ages.

Yeah, I tell them to change the channel if they see some guy in a brown suit with a telephone number at the bottom of the screen asking for money.

I think pop music has done more for oral intercourse than anything else that has ever happened, and vice versa.

Brown shoes don't make it.

The people of your century no longer require the service of composers. A composer is as useful to a person in a jogging suit as a dinsoaur turd in the middle of his runway.

Two things are universal: Hydrogen and stupidity

Anybody hear the great news, today? Jimmy Swaggart under investigation! Oh Ja-eezus! One day every one of those cocksuckers will get caught! I understand in the case of Mr. Swaggart, that he claims that it was not multiple encounters with many prostitutes - apparently, only one sweet young thing. And he did tell Cal Thomas of the Moral Majority that the sex act itself was not fully consumated. However he did admit to doing something por-no-graphic with the girl. Let's use our imaginations, ladies and gentlemen.

I think you should leave it up to the parent, because not all parents want to keep their children totally ignorant.

Why doncha come on over to the house and I'll show 'em to ya?

So much gets lost in the translation. Even if you sat there listening to it with a microscope, there's no way you're gonna find out what it means.

Fact of the matter is, there is no hip world, there is no straight world. There's a world, you see which has people in it who believe a variety of different things.

Certification from one source or another seems to be the most important thing to people all over the world. A piece of paper from a school that says you're smart, a pat on the head from your parents that says you're good or some reinforcement from your peers that makes you think what you're doing is worthwhile. People are just waiting around to get certified.

A composer's job involves the decoration of fragments of time.

You can't escape the puking sphinx.

Without deviance from normality, there can be no progress.

Nothing I've ever written has been motivated by trying to impact or influence anybody.

In every language, the first word after "Mama!" that every kid learns to say is "Mine!" A system that doesn't allow ownership, that doesn't allow you to say "Mine!" when you grow up, has

You can bet everything will come to an end. It's going to be ugly and it's going to be a mess, and it's going to be something that somebody did in the name of God....

I don't think there's a problem. First of all, I don't think music turns people into social liabilities. Because you hear a lyric

It seems that the problem with government as an institution is uniformly bad, worldwide. It may be the ONLY thing that binds all nations together - the incompetence of all of their governments...The unions are the mafia, which is the CIA, which is the Catholic Church, which is the government, which is what's the difference? It's corrupt! It's the same guys pulling these strings, you know? One day he pulls the string and this lamp comes out, the next say he pulls the string and there's a missile coming out.

Everything on this planet has something to do with music. Music functions in the realm of sculptured air.

I enjoy irritating the people who enjoy being irritated.

Kid's heads are filled with so many nonfacts that when they get out of school they're totally unprepared to do anything. They can't read, they can't write, they can't think. Talk about child abuse. The U.S. school system as a whole qualifies.

I think that people are entitled to be amused, and entertained. If they see deviations from this classical norm, it's probably good for their mental health.

Organized religions by their very natures are misleading.

Outdoors for me is walking from the car to the ticket desk at the airport

Music is the most physically inspiring of all the arts.

Okay, it was the Tree of Knowledge. "You eat this apple; you're going to be as smart as God." We can't have that.

I think that if you use the so-called "strong words" you'll get your point across faster and you can save a lot of beating around the bush. Why are people afraid of words? Sometimes the dumbest thing that gets said makes the point for you.

Decades of indoctrination, manipulation, censorship and KGB excursions haven't altered this fact: People want a piece of their own little Something-or-Other, and, if they don't get it, have a tendency to initiate counterrevolution.

I write what I like to write. Those who like to listen to it, listen to it. And the ones who don't, watch football and drink beer, jog, go to discos and so forth. I never claimed to be a man for all seasons.

Disco satisfied social as well as musical needs. Disco people got to dress up all the time and go to places ... where everybody sort of 'looked good' - and later, after an evening of chemical alteration, everybody looked even better, and the next thing they knew, they were getting The Blox Job. Punk, in the late seventies, purported to be a rebellion against this sort of silly behavior. Maniac bands started thrashing away in dingy little places with no decor, developing their own silly behavior. ... New wave evolved from punk, basically, by sterilizing its own safety pin.

People like to own things.

I have been monitoring your earthly broadcasts for many years.

Some people... some people like cupcakes Exclusively, while myself, I say, There is naught nor ought there be nothing So exalted on the face of god's grey Earth as that prince of foods... the muffin!

When God created Republicans, he gave up on everything else.

Is this something new, having people stomp on you? Is it what I need to do for your pleasure?

Let's not be too rough on our own ignorance, it's what makes America great.

Don't do speed, speed turns you in to your parents.

The whiskers sticking up from underneath his pancake makeup, and yet he was a beautiful lady.

He likes to flirt with all the boys in the class.

They's making it worse, the labor movement got the mafia curse.

I'm just one of these unpopular musicians.