I owe everything to the musicians I work with.

You can't even imagine how it felt to have a cassette that you could take with you with a microphone so you could put down an idea and not have to hum it a million times to remember what it was.

I hate wasting time.

I can find my way from 500 A.D. through to 1066 pretty well as an amateur historian.

There's nothing worse than a bunch of jaded old farts, and that's a fact.

I know that bands that haven't put out a record for 10 years are playing to 20,000 people a night. But that's not the achievement.

Theatres are built because they were the boards for entertainment.

I wanted my voice to be a tenor sax, really.

I've still got a twinkle in me.

So for a long time I closed my eyes to the possibility of America having a white voice.

You feel quite distant by playing at huge stadiums year after year, where you only can see a great darkness in front of you.

I think I'm prone to panic.

It's a two-dimensional gig being a singer, and you can get lost in your own tedium and repetition.

It's crucial that I kind of keep up, without drifting into the backslapping land of cliche and lifetime achievement awards.

Entertainment isn't just based on the very structured syndrome of European popular music, and it's great that there are so many thousands of people who are of the same opinion.

I have to try and change the landscape, whatever it is.

I've been scared and I've liked not hanging on to stuff where I know that I'm in my comfort zone.

It's not some great work of beauty and love to be a rock-and-roll singer.

I'm so aware of the fact that if I hadn't taken the chances that I've taken along the line, I probably wouldn't be getting the best out of my voice anymore, I might have messed it up in that awful, predictable place.

I like to comprehend more or less everything around me - apart from the creation of my music. It's an obsessive character trait that's getting worse. I don't switch the light on and off 15 times before I leave the room yet, but something's going wrong.

There are always generic terms like 'Americana', but there are no boundaries as to where it can go.

All over the world, the idea of creating an melange of international musics, it's a very healthy thing.

It's sort of a feeling of power onstage. It's really the ability to make people smile, or just to turn them one way or another for that duration of time, and for it to have some effect later on. I don't really think it's power... it's the goodness.

I don't want to scream 'Immigrant Song' every night for the rest of my life, and I'm not sure I could.

You would find in a lot of Zep stuff that the riff was the juggernaut that careered through and I worked the lyrics around this.

When I was a kid, I was following black soul music.

I think we're in a disposable world and 'Stairway to Heaven' is one of the things that hasn't quite been thrown away yet.

I don't think I've aged gracefully.

To rock isn't necessarily to cavort.

How can you consider flower power outdated? The essence of my lyrics is the desire for peace and harmony. That's all anyone has ever wanted. How could it become outdated?

Globalization and free trade do spur economic growth, and they lead to lower prices on many goods.

There will always be a business cycle, and white-collar workers will get hit in the next recession like they always do in recessions.

Technology is changing so fast that knowledge about specifics can quickly become obsolete. That's why so much of what technicians learn is on the job.

Sugary drinks are blamed for increasing the rates of chronic disease and obesity in America. Yet efforts to reduce their consumption through taxes or other measures have gone nowhere. The beverage industry has spent millions defeating them.

We do not want to live in a theocracy. We should maintain that barrier and government has no business telling someone what they ought to believe or how they should conduct their private lives.

Increasingly, corporate nationality is whatever a corporation decides it is.

True patriotism isn't cheap. It's about taking on a fair share of the burden of keeping America going.

The liberal ideal is that everyone should have fair access and fair opportunity. This is not equality of result. It's equality of opportunity. There's a fundamental difference.

Economies are risky. Some industries rise, and others implode, like housing. Some places get richer, and others drop, like Atlantic City. Some people get new jobs that pay better, many lose their jobs or their wages.

Your most precious possession is not your financial assets. Your most precious possession is the people you have working there, and what they carry around in their heads, and their ability to work together.

Freedom is the one value conservatives place above all others, yet time and again, their ideal of freedom ignores the growing imbalance of power in our society that's eroding the freedoms of most people.

The job creators are members of America's vast middle class and the poor, whose purchases cause businesses to expand and invest.

The only way to make sure no bank is too big to fail is to make sure no bank is too big.

The faith that anyone could move from rags to riches - with enough guts and gumption, hard work and nose to the grindstone - was once at the core of the American Dream.

Not only do unemployment benefits help families who are hurting; they also put money into their pockets that they'll then spend - and their spending will keep other Americans in jobs.

One tax dodge often used by multi-national companies is to squirrel their earnings abroad in foreign subsidiaries located in countries where taxes are lower.

By the mid-1950s, more than a third of all America workers in the private sector were unionized. And the unions demanded and received a fair slice of the American pie.

During three decades from 1947 to 1977, the nation implemented what might be called a basic bargain with American workers. Employers paid them enough to buy what they produced.

We don't have to sit by and watch our meritocracy be replaced by a permanent aristocracy, and our democracy be undermined by dynastic wealth.

Money buys the most experienced teachers, less-crowded classrooms, high-quality teaching materials, and after-school programs.