U2 Quotes
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Music is such a great communicator. It breaks down linguistic barriers, cultural barriers, it basically reaches out. That's when rock n' roll succeeds, and that's what virtuosity is all about.
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The problem for most people as they get older is that they start to buy into their own bullshit to the extent that they just have to eliminate from their inner sanctum anyone who is going to really challenge it. But I think all bandmates of U2 were lucky enough to have the four of us respect and regard each other to the extent that we're kind of always looking out for one another, so none of us can get away with buying into the bullshit.
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Segregation. There was another one. America sees this now but it took a civil rights movement to betray their age. And 50 years ago the U.S. Supreme Court betrayed the age May 17, 1954, Brown vs. Board of Education came down and put the lie to the idea that separate can ever really be equal. Amen to that.
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I think ABBA have a pure joy to their music and that's what makes them extraordinary.
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When those people get up at the Grammys and say, "I thank God", I always imagine God going, "Oh, don't, please don't thank me for that one. Please, oh, that's an awful one! Don't thank me for that - that's a piece of crap !"
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One of the good things about globalization is it has created a single international music community, and I feel very much part of it.
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Can you imagine your second album - the difficult second album - it's about God? Everyone is tearing their hair out and Chris Blackwell says, 'It's okay. There's Bob Marley and Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan, it's a tradition. We can get through it.
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A trumpet sounds pretty much like a trumpet, and that's true of a lot instruments; pianos sound like pianos, but there's something about the guitar - the range of possibilities is much broader.
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I think it's hard to come to a U2 show and just eat hot dogs and drink a soda, and not be moved by it.
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The big cop-out would be to accept popularity rather than opting to try to create potent work. It's so easy to do the popular thing, the expected thing, and that's where you start to cheat yourself - and your fans, in the end - because there's an inherent dishonesty in pandering and dishing up what everyone's expecting.
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First love is alright, as far as it goes. Last love – that’s the one I’m interested in.
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When you align yourself with God's purpose as described in the Scriptures, something special happens to your life.
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When John Lennon sings, 'Oh, my love/For the first time in my life/My eyes are wide open' - these songs have an intimacy for me that's not just between people, I realize now, not just sexual intimacy. A spiritual intimacy.
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Contrary to reports, this boy is not a billionaire or going to be richer than any Beatle - and not just in the sense of money, by the way. The Beatles are untouchable. That’s just a joke.
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All That You Can't Leave Behind and How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb are both really mad long titles. As I've just said them, I've just realised how ridiculous the titles are.
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Running my hands really fast up and down the fretboard... I mean, anybody can do that. It's the Guitar Olympics, and I can't think of anything more pointless.
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U2 albums never get finished. They just get released.
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Unfortunately, as far as the music is concerned, what defines relevance is whether you are on the radio or whether you are on the cover of a magazine or whether you're winning MTV awards, and so on and so forth.
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The idea that there is one kind of African is, of course, ridiculous. Sometimes African entrepreneurs want to kill you because you are saying public health is the priority, not roads. Of course they are right to press for that issue, but so are we right, I believe, to argue, for example, that millions of children could and should be vaccinated.
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The music that really turns me on is either running toward God or away from God. Both recognize the pivot, that God is at the center of the jaunt.
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'We used to say, 'They have everything, but it.' We had nothing, but it'.
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God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them.
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If you're wondering what I'm doing here, at a prayer breakfast, well, so am I. I'm certainly not here as a man of the cloth, unless that cloth is leather. It's certainly not because I'm a rock star. Which leaves one possible explanation: I'm here because I've got a messianic complex. Yes, it's true. And for anyone who knows me, it's hardly a revelation.
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What turns me on about the digital age, what excited me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop.