Quotes about radio
page 4

David Bowie photo

“Let's dance — put on your red shoes and dance the blues.
Let's dance — to the song they're playin' on the radio.
Let's sway — while colour lights up your face.
Let's swa —, sway through the crowd to an empty space.”

David Bowie (1947–2016) British musician, actor, record producer and arranger

Let's Dance — Video at YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NelPivNLPZ8
Song lyrics, Let's Dance (1983)

Gary Gygax photo
Rodger Bumpass photo
Georges Duhamel photo
Frances Bean Cobain photo

“No. I would have felt more awkward if I'd been a fan. I was around 15 when I realized he was inescapable. Even if I was in a car and had the radio on, there's my dad. He's larger than life and our culture is obsessed with dead musicians. We love to put them on a pedestal. If Kurt had just been another guy who abandoned his family in the most awful way possible… But he wasn't. He inspired people to put him on a pedestal, to become St. Kurt.”

Frances Bean Cobain (1992) American artist

Response to the question, "Did you feel awkward as a teenager, not being that interested in the music Kurt made?"
" Frances Bean Cobain on Life After Kurt's Death: An Exclusive Q&A http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/frances-bean-life-after-kurt-cobain-death-exclusive-interview-20150408" (2015)

Jackson Pollock photo
Don Imus photo
Albert Camus photo

“The world is what it is, which is to say, nothing much. This is what everyone learned yesterday, thanks to the formidable concert of opinion coming from radios, newspapers, and information agencies.”

Albert Camus (1913–1960) French author and journalist

Between Hell and Reason (1945)
Context: The world is what it is, which is to say, nothing much. This is what everyone learned yesterday, thanks to the formidable concert of opinion coming from radios, newspapers, and information agencies. Indeed we are told, in the midst of hundreds of enthusiastic commentaries, that any average city can be wiped out by a bomb the size of a football. American, English, and French newspapers are filled with eloquent essays on the future, the past, the inventors, the cost, the peaceful incentives, the military advantages, and even the life-of-its-own character of the atom bomb.
We can sum it up in one sentence: Our technical civilization has just reached its greatest level of savagery. We will have to choose, in the more or less near future, between collective suicide and the intelligent use of our scientific conquests.
Meanwhile we think there is something indecent in celebrating a discovery whose use has caused the most formidable rage of destruction ever known to man. What will it bring to a world already given over to all the convulsions of violence, incapable of any control, indifferent to justice and the simple happiness of men — a world where science devotes itself to organized murder? No one but the most unrelenting idealists would dare to wonder.

Christopher Isherwood photo

“You’ve got to think, to discriminate, to exercise your own free will and judgment. And you must do this, I repeat, without tension, quite rationally and calmly. For if you give way to fury against the hypnotists, if you smash the radio and tear the newspapers to shreds, you will only rush to the other extreme and fossilize into defiant eccentricity.”

Christopher Isherwood (1904–1986) English novelist

"Los Angeles", p. 161
Exhumations (1966)
Context: To live sanely in Los Angeles (or, I suppose, in any other large American city) you have to cultivate the art of staying awake. You must learn to resist (firmly but not tensely) the unceasing hypnotic suggestions of the radio, the billboards, the movies and the newspapers; those demon voices which are forever whispering in your ear what you should desire, what you should fear, what you should wear and eat and drink and enjoy, what you should think and do and be. They have planned a life for you – from the cradle to the grave and beyond – which it would be easy, fatally easy, to accept. The least wandering of the attention, the least relaxation of your awareness, and already the eyelids begin to droop, the eyes grow vacant, the body starts to move in obedience to the hypnotist’s command. Wake up, wake up – before you sign that seven-year contract, buy that house you don’t really want, marry that girl you secretly despise. Don’t reach for the whisky, that won’t help you. You’ve got to think, to discriminate, to exercise your own free will and judgment. And you must do this, I repeat, without tension, quite rationally and calmly. For if you give way to fury against the hypnotists, if you smash the radio and tear the newspapers to shreds, you will only rush to the other extreme and fossilize into defiant eccentricity.

Marshall McLuhan photo

“The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber.”

Understanding Media (1964)
Context: Radio affects most intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener. That is the immediate aspect of radio. A private experience. The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber. (p. 261)

“Then after his death in London in taxis, on radio and TV I heard nothing but Elvis records and that grabbed my attention.”

Elaine Dundy (1921–2008) American journalist, actress

As quoted in "Interview: Elaine Dundy, celebrated author of the seminal book, Elvis & Gladys: Genesis of The King, talks to EIN" (2004) http://www.elvisinfonet.com/dundy1.html
Context: I didn't know Elvis was alive until he was dead. But how many stories are like mine? Until his death August 16, 1977, it was possible to get through a day without hearing his name. Of course I remember all the early outrage he caused but believe me it was easy not to see any of his films. It doesn't mean that music has not always dominated my heart and mind. During the years barren of Elvis I did have my record player on constantly but it was playing folk, blues, and jazz. It was playing Al Jolson, Maurice Chevalier, Billie Holiday, Ethel Merman, and Noel Coward. The human voice raised in song has always been important to me so I include Miles Davis whose trumpet is such an important human voice. Then after his death in London in taxis, on radio and TV I heard nothing but Elvis records and that grabbed my attention.

Bono photo

“I know idealism is not playing on the radio right now, you don't see it on TV, irony is on heavy rotation, the knowingness, the smirk, the tired joke. I've tried them all out but I'll tell you this, outside this campus — and even inside it — idealism is under siege beset by materialism, narcissism and all the other isms of indifference.”

Bono (1960) Irish rock musician, singer of U2

PENN Address (2004)
Context: I know idealism is not playing on the radio right now, you don't see it on TV, irony is on heavy rotation, the knowingness, the smirk, the tired joke. I've tried them all out but I'll tell you this, outside this campus — and even inside it — idealism is under siege beset by materialism, narcissism and all the other isms of indifference. Baggism, Shaggism. Raggism. Notism, graduationism, chismism, I don't know. Where's John Lennon when you need him?

Marshall McLuhan photo
Jim Morrison photo

“Now listen to this…
Ill tell you about texas radio and the big beat”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

An American Prayer (1978)
Context: Now listen to this...
Ill tell you about texas radio and the big beat
Soft driven, slow and mad Like some new language
Reaching your head with the cold, sudden fury of a divine messenger
Let me tell you about heartache and the loss of god
Wandering, wandering in hopeless night
Out here in the perimeter there are no stars...
Out here we is stoned...
Immaculate.

“Two a.m. in a dark alley or on a mountainside is not the time to discover your unit is missing a key piece of equipment, or that you are not sure of the radio frequencies of an adjacent unit.”

Wheeler L. Baker (1938) President of Hargrave Military Academy

Source: Crisis Management: A Model For Managers (1993), p. 76
Context: Two a. m. in a dark alley or on a mountainside is not the time to discover your unit is missing a key piece of equipment, or that you are not sure of the radio frequencies of an adjacent unit. The procedural check lists created in training will prevent those critical and unacceptable mistakes. This is the time to benefit from those "lessons learned". But leaders must schedule the time to train, do it right, critique, and move on. It is an investment that will bring the most return.

Margaret Atwood photo

“Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters,
or none that can be finally buried.
Finish one off, and circumstances
and the radio create another.
Believe me: whole armies have prayed fervently
to God all night and meant it,
and been slaughtered anyway.”

Morning in the Burned House (1995), The Loneliness of the Military Historian
Context: Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters,
or none that can be finally buried.
Finish one off, and circumstances
and the radio create another.
Believe me: whole armies have prayed fervently
to God all night and meant it,
and been slaughtered anyway.
Brutality wins frequently,
and large outcomes have turned on the invention
of a mechanical device, viz. radar.
True, valour sometimes counts for something,
as at Thermopylae. Sometimes being right —
though ultimate virtue, by agreed tradition,
is decided by the winner.
Sometimes men throw themselves on grenades
and burst like paper bags of guts
to save their comrades.
I can admire that.
But rats and cholera have won many wars.
Those, and potatoes,
or the absence of them.

Chuck Palahniuk photo

“No one wants to admit we're addicted to music. That's just not possible. No one's addicted to music and television and radio. We just need more of it, more channels, a larger screen, more volume. We can't bear to be without it, but no, nobody's addicted. We could turn it off anytime we wanted.”

Source: Lullaby (2002), Chapter 3
Context: No one wants to admit we're addicted to music. That's just not possible. No one's addicted to music and television and radio. We just need more of it, more channels, a larger screen, more volume. We can't bear to be without it, but no, nobody's addicted. We could turn it off anytime we wanted. I fit a window frame into a brick wall. With a little brush, the size for fingernail polish, I glue it. The window is the size of a fingernail. The glue smells like hair spray. The smell tastes like oranges and gasoline

Learned Hand photo

“The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen and the far-spread magazine, rules the country whether we like it or not, we must learn to accept it.”

Learned Hand (1872–1961) American legal scholar, Court of Appeals judge

"Proceedings in Memory of Justice Brandeis" (1942).
Extra-judicial writings
Context: The day has clearly gone forever of societies small enough for their members to have personal acquaintance with one another, and to find their station through the appraisal of those who have first hand knowledge of them. Publicity is an evil substitute and the art of publicity is a black art; but it has come to stay, every year adds to its potency and to the finality of its judgments. The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen and the far-spread magazine, rules the country whether we like it or not, we must learn to accept it.

Edwin Howard Armstrong photo

“Anyone who has had actual contact with the making of the inventions that built the radio art knows that these inventions have been the product of experiment and work based on physical reasoning, rather than on the mathematicians' calculations and formulae.”

Edwin Howard Armstrong (1890–1954) American electrical engineer and inventor

As quoted in Electronics (2005) by P. Arun, p. 310
Context: Anyone who has had actual contact with the making of the inventions that built the radio art knows that these inventions have been the product of experiment and work based on physical reasoning, rather than on the mathematicians' calculations and formulae. Precisely the opposite impression is obtained from many of our present day text books and publications.

Colin Wilson photo

“Religion, mysticism and magic all spring from the same basic 'feeling' about the universe: a sudden feeling of meaning, which human beings sometimes 'pick up' accidentally, as your radio might pick up some unknown station.”

Source: The Occult: A History (1971), p. 28
Context: Religion, mysticism and magic all spring from the same basic 'feeling' about the universe: a sudden feeling of meaning, which human beings sometimes 'pick up' accidentally, as your radio might pick up some unknown station. Poets feel that we are cut off from meaning by a thick, lead wall, and that sometimes for no reason we can understand the wall seems to vanish and we are suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the infinite interestingness of things.

Richard Wright photo
Albert Hofmann photo

“If one of the two is lacking, no reality happens, no radio music plays, the picture screen remains blank.”

Albert Hofmann (1906–2008) Swiss chemist

Ch. 11 : LSD Experience and Reality http://www.psychedelic-library.org/child11.htm
LSD : My Problem Child (1980)
Context: Of greatest significance to me has been the insight that I attained as a fundamental understanding from all of my LSD experiments: what one commonly takes as "the reality," including the reality of one's own individual person, by no means signifies something fixed, but rather something that is ambiguous — that there is not only one, but that there are many realities, each comprising also a different consciousness of the ego.
One can also arrive at this insight through scientific reflections. The problem of reality is and has been from time immemorial a central concern of philosophy. It is, however, a fundamental distinction, whether one approaches the problem of reality rationally, with the logical methods of philosophy, or if one obtrudes upon this problem emotionally, through an existential experience. The first planned LSD experiment was therefore so deeply moving and alarming, because everyday reality and the ego experiencing it, which I had until then considered to be the only reality, dissolved, and an unfamiliar ego experienced another, unfamiliar reality. The problem concerning the innermost self also appeared, which, itself unmoved, was able to record these external and internal transformations.
Reality is inconceivable without an experiencing subject, without an ego. It is the product of the exterior world, of the sender and of a receiver, an ego in whose deepest self the emanations of the exterior world, registered by the antennae of the sense organs, become conscious. If one of the two is lacking, no reality happens, no radio music plays, the picture screen remains blank.

Reza Pahlavi photo
George Adamski photo
Kai Ryssdal photo

“If you think about how you sound on the radio while you are on the radio, you will fuck up how you sound on the radio.”

Kai Ryssdal (1963) Radio host, United States Navy officer

Interviewed by Sarah Ball, "What you should know about Kai Ryssdal" https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/11/kai-ryssdal-marketplace-profile, Vanity Fair (November 2013).

Charles Stross photo
David Foster Wallace photo
Charles Stross photo

“Suppose rather than passing the plate in church, they get a radio show and pass the plate and half a million listeners donate. Isn’t that going to convince a preacher that it’s all true? Wealth comes to the faithful, that’s the message they’re going to take. An’ I never yet met a con man who wasn’t the better at the job for believing his own spiel.”

“That’s not…untrue. But money corrupts. Almost invariably, powers that arise around money are corrupted by it. He might have started out as a true believer, but money has a way of taking over. A church is a business, after all, and those employees or executives who are good at raising money are promoted by their fellows.”
Source: The Laundry Files, The Apocalypse Codex (2012), Chapter 7, “Communion” (p. 126)

Norman Thomas photo

“By every test of civil liberty Russian life is at least as much regimented as in the Fascist countries. The press, schools, and radio are if anything more absolutely controlled. … To strike is as dangerous in Russia as in Germany....”

Norman Thomas (1884–1968) American Presbyterian minister and socialist

As quoted in Norman Thomas: Respectable Rebel, Murray B. Seidler, Syracuse University Press, 1961, p. 187

Albert Einstein photo
Michael Parenti photo
Chris Cornell photo

“What I hear in my brain (brain radio) dictates the beginning of any attempt at a new song.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Chris Cornell: The American Songwriter Twitterview, American Songwriter, November 1, 2011 https://americansongwriter.com/2011/11/chris-cornell-the-american-songwriter-twitterview/,
Soundgarden Era

DJ Paul photo

“The glorious years of discovery in radio astronomy in the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge were dominated by the personality of Martin Ryle.”

Martin Ryle (1918–1984) English radio astronomer

Geoffrey Burbidge http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/114263939/ABSTRACT?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0.

Ravi Shankar photo

“An hour of the real thing. Ravi Shankar, a wonderful virtuoso, played his own Indian music to us at the radio station. Brilliant, fascinating, stimulating, wonderfully played. Unbelievable skill and invention.”

Ravi Shankar (1920–2012) Indian musician and sitar player

By the world's most performed opera composer Benjamin Britten quoted in Letter found from Britain's greatest opera composer's drawer shows his love for Ravi Shankar, 2 October 2013, Official website of Ravishnkar Organization http://www.ravishankar.org/,

Jack White photo

“Is this some kind of fucking radio promotion? What the fuck is this? Let me just say that if whatever said radio station tries to blacklist us for my comments about their balloons, I would like them to know I want a written apology tomorrow for interrupting my song.”

Jack White (1975) American musician and record producer

AT The Greek Theatre in Berkeley, California after some balloons bearing a radio station's logo floated on stage.
Chonin, Neva (2005). "White Stripes huge but not bloated" http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/08/15/DDGTAE7B261.DTL&type=music SFGate.com (accessed June 19, 2007)
2010

Al Gore photo
Charles de Gaulle photo

“Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished. Tomorrow, as today, I will speak on Radio London.”

Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970) eighteenth President of the French Republic

Appeal of June 18, Speech of June 18

Marilyn Ferguson photo
David Sedaris photo
Noam Chomsky photo

“The Crisis, the civilizational crisis of the West at this point is devastating... it does bring up childhood memories of listening to Hitler raving on the radio to raucous crowds... it makes you wonder if this species is even viable.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Noam Chomsky: Coronavirus - What is at stake? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-N3In2rLI4 | Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) Mar 28, 2020
Quotes 2010s, 2020, Coronavirus - What is at stake?

William L. Shirer photo
Beto O'Rourke photo

“Punk rock, at its best, was just stripping down all the corporate rock I was hearing on the radio in the 1980s and getting down to its most basic roots.”

Beto O'Rourke (1972) American politician

[Tilove, Jonathan, Beto Effin’ O’Rourke: On running for Senate with the expletive undeleted First Reading, http://politics.blog.mystatesman.com/2017/09/25/beto-effin-orourke-on-running-for-senate-with-the-expletive-undeleted/, My Statesman, 12 November 2018, en, September 25, 2017] On his days in his rock band, Foss
2017

Rose Wilder Lane photo
Prevale photo

“Radio, a job for those who have deep passion in the soul and desire to share emotions.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) La radio, un lavoro per chi ha profonda passione nell'anima e voglia di condividere emozioni.
Source: prevale.net

Mary Ruwart photo
George Marshall photo
Sara Shane photo

“All the experience I had in television, radio, theater, stage and films gave me confidence in front of crowds. Because of that, I can talk to an audience of a thousand people without a moment's nervousness, and talk without a script for hours.”

Sara Shane (1928–2022) American actress

Interview with Elaine Hollingsworth https://web.archive.org/web/20071003020618/http://www.tarzan.cc/int-sarashane.html (July 9, 2007)

Pierre Bouvier photo
Rush Limbaugh photo

“I am on the radio for one reason: to attract the largest audience I can and hold it. I am not in a think tank.”

Rush Limbaugh (1951) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, author, and television personality

1990s

Jay Samit photo
Eminem photo