“When one door is closed, many more is open.” —Coming in from the Cold, from the album Confrontation

“Truth is the light, so you never give up the fight.”—Final jamming of Live at the Roxy (recorded 1976).

“Though the road’s been rocky it sure feels good to me.”

“They say: only the fittest of the fittest shall survive, stay alive!” —Could You Be Loved, from the album Uprising (1979)

“The people who were trying to make this world worse are not taking the day off. Why should I?”

“Rastafari not a culture, it’s a reality.”

“Put your vision to reality.”

“My future is righteousness.”

“My feet is my only carriage.”

“Me only have one ambition, y’know. I only have one thing I really like to see happen. I like to see mankind live together – black, white, Chinese, everyone – that’s all.”

“Love the life you live, live the life you love.”

“Live for yourself and you will live in vain; live for others, and you will live again.”

“If you’re white and you’re wrong, then you’re wrong; if you’re black and you’re wrong, you’re wrong. People are people. Black, blue, pink, green – God make no rules about color; only society make rules where my people suffer, and that why we must have redemption and redemption now.”

“I’ve been here before and will come again, but I’m not going this trip through.”

“I don’t know how to live good. I only know how to suffer.”

“Have no fear for atomic energy, ’cause none of them can stop the time.”

“Everything is political. I will never be a politician or even think political. Me just deal with life and nature. That is the greatest thing to me.”

“Every time I plant a seed, He say kill it before it grow, he say kill it before they grow.”

“Every day the bucket a-go a well, one day the bottom a-go drop out.”—I Shot The Sheriff, from the album Burnin’ (1973)

“Don’t trust people whose feelings change with time. Trust people whose feelings remain the same, even when the time changes.”

“Better to die fighting for freedom than be a prisoner all the days of your life.”

“Babylon is everywhere. You have wrong and you have right. Wrong is what we call Babylon, wrong things. That is what Babylon is to me. I could have born in England, I could have born in America, it make no difference where me born, because there is Babylon everywhere.”

“As a man sow, shall he reap. and I know that talk is cheap. But the heat of the battle is as sweet as the victory.”

“All dese governments and dis this and that, these people that say they’re here to help, why them say you cannot smoke the herb? Herb… herb is a plant, you know? And when me check it, me can’t find no reason.” “All them say is, ‘it make you rebel’. Against what?”