Michael Nesmith Quotes

You don't have to fight against being placed in a box any more than the number two has to fight against being the number three. I mean, two is not going to be the number three, ever.

The only people who steal are thieves, and that’s a very small percentage of civilization. Most people want to have some way to make the economic transaction valid. They want to return the favor, if you will… return the benefit and reciprocate...

It's important to be precise about words, because of the thought value of them-they frame and shape so much of the way we understand things.

People recognize intellectual property the same way they recognize real estate. People understand what property is. But it's a new kind of property, and so the understanding uses new control surfaces. It uses a new way of defining the property.

If you love music, than you can play music.

There are more honest people and more good people than there are thieves and bad people. It's just always been that way.

I'm not performing now. What I do now is listen to music all day long. Listening is very nourishing to me. I might go back to perform, I might make another record. I've got a record half finished.

Behind every dark cloud there's usually rain

The rock sitting on the shelf has potential because it can fall - it's the same way with the Internet. It has this potential. It's not really doing it yet, but it's about to.

You have to have access to ideas. The Internet is facilitating that access to ideas. In 25 years, the way that data's going to flow back and forth, we don't quite understand yet.

I never feel like I have to hang on to the music. I don't expect that the music will go away. Ideas are the only thing I can point to that are permanent and fixed.

There is a certain logic to events that pushes you along a certain path. You go along the path that feels the most true, and most according to the principles that are guiding you, and that's the way the decisions are made.

Don't object so much, you'll live longer.

The Internet provides the access to resources, so it's incumbent upon the people who control those resources to make sure that the economic engine stays intact.

I coined a word the other day, but I forgot what it was. It was a good one, it came to me in a dream.

Just because you can thrill a toddler by chewing with your mouth open doesn’t mean you should.

As an artist, you don't think about the parabola or the arc you're describing or where you're going to ultimately end up, you're just kind of crawling around, seeing what's out there.

There's this notion that allows people to create their own collection of songs, so it rewrites what a song is. They may only want 10 seconds of something, or they may only want this particular song, or they want this group of songs. It becomes much more user-controlled.

Some ways of using our thinking are really inspiring. There are people who use their thinking to race cars. People use their thinking to build rockets to the moon. It’s all just a use of your thinking.

I’d play my nose now, but I’m... it’s... my nose is... out being fixed!

Even when I take the path to go be a CEO for a month, or a CEO for a day- music is still there. It’s an extremely important part of what I am.

It's what the Iraqi people are going through right now. They have encountered a victorious, hostile force - but, you know, there they still are. There their culture is, there their history is, they're not going anywhere.

It's clear that people are going to download media files, and they're going to talk to each other, and they're going to exchange information and knowledge and so forth. So this system logic is basically what you bounce off of.

Buzzwords and cliches - those are stock in trade. There's nothing wrong with them.

I don't quite know what a record is anymore. I don't quite know how to describe it. Don't know how to define it yet, so I'm just letting it gestate, and grow and see if maybe I'll get a better sense of what a record is.