Pete Townshend Quotes

The day you open your mind to music, you're halfway to opening your mind to life.

Rock music is important to people , because it allows them to escape this crazy world. It allows them not to run away from the problems that are there, but to face up to them , but at the same time sort of DANCE ALL OVER THEM. That's what rock and roll is about.

Respect yourself. Try to remember that not everything in life can be perfect. You will make mistakes. That's inevitable. But you are not ugly. You will only be ugly when you behave in an ugly way.

Rock 'n' Roll might not solve your problems, but it does let you dance all over them

The facts don't always reveal the truth, but the truth always reveals the facts.

Keith Moon, God rest his soul, once drove his car through the glass doors of a hotel, driving all the way up to the reception desk, got out and asked for the key to his room.

I played the guitar for ten years before I realized it wasn't a weapon.

No matter what happens in the future, rock and roll will save the world.

Poverty is not something people impose on themselves for want of effort and community organisation. It is constructed by divisive and discriminatory laws, inflexible organisations, acquisitive ideologies of wealth, a deeply rooted class system and policies which serve privilege in the short term and destroy society in the long term.

I have terrible hearing trouble. I have unwittingly helped to invent and refine a type of music that makes its principal proponents deaf.

If it screams truth rather than help, if it commits itself with a courage that it can't be sure it really has, if it stands up and admits that something is wrong, but doesn't insist on blood, then it's rock n' roll.

Enjoy life. And be careful what you pray for - remember, you will get it all.

I smash guitars because I like them.

Nothing else in nature behaves so consistently and rigidly as a human being in pursuit of hell.

When I grew up, what was interesting for me was that music was color and life was gray. So music for me has always been more than entertainment.

Pick up my guitar and play, just like yesterday / And I get on my knees and pray.

I think I probably would have enjoyed to keep my own private pain out of my work. But I was changed by my audience who said your private pain which you have unwittingly shown us in your early songs is also ours.

Can't pretend that growin' older never hurts.

I want to age with some dignity.

I believe rock can do anything, it's the ultimate vehicle for everything

We've got to fool the fools, and plan the plans. We must rule the rules, got to stand the stands.

No one respects the flame quite like the fool who's badly burned

There's no easy way to be free.

The fact of the matter is, I'm f**king brilliant. Not 'was' brilliant. 'Am' brilliant.

Deep inside of every human being is this feeling that nothing is ever going to be complete, that the circle will never connect - and that itself is the secret to infinity.