My theory is this; I'm not a political songwriter. I'm an honest songwriter.

An isolationist America is no bloody use to anyone.

I was in a little punk band and we put out a few punk records that weren't very political, at all.

So, in some ways, the political songs tend to be a bit more like reportage, whereas the love songs tend to be like novels, you can pick them up off the shelf and go into them any time.

I'm still batting away on my politics for the Labour Party. I'm much further to the left of them than I used to be, but that's because they've moved, not me.

But, in the end, even a song that's as politically bland as Blowin in the Wind, you probably wouldn't get up and sing that now, whereas some of Bob Dylan's love songs that were contemporary with that, like say Girl from the North Country, you can still get up an play now.

It's not a very popular subject amongst my audience, who are by nature more internationalist, but I don't choose what to write about, I don't choose my subjects, they kind of choose me.

Being spokesman for a generation is the worst job I ever had.

Were it not for the Clash, punk would have been just a sneer, a safety pin and a pair of bondage trousers.

There are quite a few honest songwriters out there writing about relationships and their own personality traits. But for some reason, once they step out of the bedroom, their honesty doesn't seem to come with them.

All the great political music was made at the height of political confrontations.

The most important thing for anyone, I think, is to be engaged, whether you're an artist or a journalist is to be engaged in the process at some level.

I'm trying to make a case for those people who don't have a sense of belonging that they should have, that there is something really worthwhile in having a sense of belonging, and recasting and looking at our modern history.

I came into this whole business by going to see Rock Against Racism gigs with the Clash.

That taught me one lesson which is that you're naive to believe that bands can change the world. Bands are very naive to think that just if their audience thinks that they can change the world, that they can. That was quite a lesson for my career, really.

Even with politics, stuff comes around again. Woody Guthrie would recognize America today.

I enjoyed so much working with the guys from Wilco, and riffing off of them, and having someone come up to me with ideas, because normally in the studio it's me who has to come up with all the ideas.

My theory is this; I'm not a political songwriter. I'm an honest songwriter.

I've had songs written during the Falklands war, and during the first Gulf war I got letters from soldiers saying they were listening to these songs, like Island of no return.

In that sense, I became politicized because the people in the coal mining villages who were involved in the struggle knew why they were there. But they couldn't understand why some pop star from London would want to be there.

My upbringing was very straightforward suburban working class upbringing.

All musicians start out with ideals but hanging on to them in the face of media scrutiny takes real integrity. Tougher still is to live up to the ideals of your dedicated fans.

I try and write honestly about what I see around me now.

By the time I was 19, punk had occurred. It had a completely different cultural dynamic to it which rejected everything and started again from the year zero.

We read our own political content into The Clash, and they accepted it.

Most of the people that I went to school with - I went to secondary school - we were educated to go and work in the line at Ford's, and if we were lucky, technical skilled labor. I sort of rejected that, and thought I wanted to do something else.

Entropy theory is indeed a first attempt to deal with global form; but it has not been dealing with structure. All it says is that a large sum of elements may have properties not found in a smaller sample of them.

My theory is if you have a religion, it's a good one. Because some people don't have any at all.

There's a statistical theory that if you gave a million monkeys typewriters and set them to work, they'd eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know this isn't true.

My object will be, first, to show by what connections the history of the fossil bones of land animals is linked to the theory of the earth and why they have a particular importance in this respect.

No theory is good unless it permits, not rest, but the greatest work. No theory is good except on condition that one use it to go on beyond.

From this bestial view that the human mind consists of only sense certainty, pleasure and pain, Locke developed an equally bestial theory of the nation. Man originally existed in a State of Nature of complete liberty.

Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.

Theory not only formulates what we know but also tells us what we want to know, that is, the questions to which an answer is needed.

The theory of evolution is totally inadequate to explain the origin and manifestation of the inorganic world.

Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.

Being used to scientific terminology and theory it was always natural for me to push this stuff into songs.

They do not merely collect texts; they must also gather data about the context and the informant and, above all, write an analysis of the items based upon the course readings and lecture material on folklore theory and method.

A political theory seeks to find from history the limits of the politically possible.

Land: A part of the earth's surface, considered as property. The theory that land is property subject to private ownership and control is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure.

I have a theory about that, if you have to say something, if you have encourage for one second a prospective acting student - he should not go in to acting.

What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century the experimental proof for the interdependence of the composition and properties of chemical compounds resulted in the theory that they are mutually related, so that like composition governs like properties, and conversely.

Each pursues his own theory, little solicitous to correct or improve it by an attention to what is advanced by his opponents.

I should point out, however, that at first some difficulty was experienced in observing the phenomena predicted by the theory, owing to the extreme smallness of the variations in the period of oscillation.

By means of microscopic observation and astronomical projection the lotus flower can become the foundation for an entire theory of the universe and an agent whereby we may perceive Truth.

The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage.

But we did conclude that Ray had actually killed Dr. King pursuant to his theory that he was going to be able to get hold of that money. He had learned of this offer through his ties in the Missouri State Penitentiary.

I joined the Army and was sent to the MIT radiation laboratory after a few months of introduction to electromagnetic wave theory in a special course, given for Army personnel at the University of Chicago.