Being nice is a lot easier when youre loaded. Of course I can be a bas — Chris Martin

"Up until 23, the concept of death hadnt occurred to me, then someone asked me if Id heard about Jonty, this friend from school. I said, "No, what?" "Hes dead." I used to play football with him. Thats amazing, isnt it? Life is right now. Its not a morbid realisation, its exciting, I find that feeling of time constraint very liberating. Nobody has an answer. We all die in the end. So come on, lets do something now. source"

"I know Im going to get shit for saying this, but yeah, I dont want to be too happy. To write I have to feel slightly sorry for myself. You have to be in a slightly self-obsessed state of mind to sit at a piano for six hours and not worry about meeting someone for a date. My best songs come when I have that feeling that Ive left the party early. And the other reason our songs are all about struggling and worrying and being beleaguered is my dad. Hes a terrible worrier. Hes always after the next thing. And I am too. Luckily the other members are more relaxed. Three other members like me and wed go nuts."

"I definitely believe in God. How can you look at anything and not be over-whelmed by the miraculousness of it?"

"“I always ring my dad when I want to quit, and he goes, [in a plummy voice] ‘Well I wouldn’t give up yet, boy.’ So I think, ‘All right then. I won’t.’ He’d be a brilliant boxing trainer. He sprays me down, rinses out my mouth and tells me to get back in the ring and sock that (Alan) McGee fella for six.” source"

"Whats good about the way we write songs is that I never quite know what Im doing cause I cant read music. source"

"Theyd all left for America — they were short-term lets — so theyd always leave food and, cos we didnt have much money, we would eat the rest of their cornflakes and listen to Ricky (Gervais) on XFM. source source"

"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."

"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."

"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"

"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"