“Now, where did we ever get the idea that there is such a thing as 'good government?'”

Source: Extras

Source: One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish

Source: The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)

Reported in Jonathan Horsley, " Queens of the Stone Age: Josh Homme Q&A http://www.decibelmagazine.com/uncategorized/queens-of-the-stone-age-josh-homme-qa/", Decibel Magazine (July 22nd, 2011).

"'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" (1965)

De Abaitua interview (1998)
Context: To me, when we talk about the world, we are talking about our ideas of the world. Our ideas of organisation, our different religions, our different economic systems, our ideas about it are the world. We are heading for a radical revision where you could say we are heading towards the end of the world, but more in the R. E. M. sense than the Revelation sense. That is what apocalypse means – revelation. I could square that with the end of the world, a revelation, a new way of looking at things, something that completely radicalises our notions of the where we were, when we were, what we were, something like that would constitute an end to the world in the kind of abstract – yet very real sense – that I am talking about. A change in the language, a change in the thinking, a change in the music. It wouldn’t take much – one big scientific idea, or artistic idea, one good book, one good painting – who knows – we are at a critical point where the ideas are coming thicker and faster and stranger and stranger than they ever were before. They are realised at a greater speed, everything has become very fluid.

Source: The Night Land (1912), Chapter 13

"The Brooklyn Divines." Brooklyn Union (Brooklyn, NY), 1883.

Variant: If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.
Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 50e