Herbert Quotes

I read somewhere that if you translated all the gadgets and technology in our houses to make our lives easier and save time, each of us would have the equivalent of 300 slaves, in Roman times. We have these incredible luxuries, incredible power and privileges, but we seem to be squandering them on little plastic spoons to stir our coffee with, that'll last two seconds in our lives.

Often people try and just consider music as music, in a musical context. People seem to forget that music is not just audio material - it's also the artwork, the packaging it comes in.

As never before does the keeping of our economic machine in tune depend upon wise policies in the administrative side of the government.

I came out of an electronic music scene that based all its music on software. It was a real boys thing, a real testosterone thing - software and the relationship between music and the software - to the point where it was like a closely guarded secret.

I don't listen to a huge amount of music generally. Partly because you've sat in a studio for 10 hours and then when you come home you just want to read a book, and listen to the sound of your central heating system.

I think I have a particular logic of my own that has to do with sound and sampling sound, and there isn't a great deal of music out there in that field. Whereas, harmonically and melodically, there's loads.

Actually, time and time again people always come back to my early, more innocent stuff, and say, "I kind of prefer that." I could go back to writing that and probably make more people happy, but it just doesn't feel like the right thing to do. I don't want to take the lazy route.

I try to be original in every piece of music I do, and of course I probably fail every time.

Chaos is hateful. That indeterminate nature of war brings a really unsettling atmosphere to life.

Pigs are very intelligent. They're very misunderstood. Yet they're sort of man's unofficial best friend.

I've heard the sound of 70 condoms being scraped over the floor at the British Museum. It feels like being an adventurer. Why would you stay in your living room if you could go out and experience things no one's ever experienced?

As I get older, everything feels like it's fundamentally connected, and once you've accepted the idea that business is right, and the free market - though there's never really been one - is right, then everything else just follows naturally from there.

I know I have patterns and I've always tried hard to avoid them. There are definitely certain things in my music, if I'm looking back, "Well, that was a period where I was experimenting with a certain kind of chord structure or a certain kind of sound." I've tried really hard, but I'd be hard pressed to tell you what that sound, what that tangible sound of "me" is.

I always talk about my ambition with music, and it's to sort of seduce people into listening to sounds they wouldn't normally listen to or want to hear.

The more you look into pigs the more you realize quite how everywhere they are. People come in contact with parts of pigs probably between 20 and 50 times a day. And that's before you even eat your dinner. And yet we just have a long string of negative words about them.

I think people are complacent about sound, because we're so limited by the textures and timbres we hear in music, but in our everyday life we hear the most incredible things.

Other than rhythm, the only thing I could say is that I take a great deal of pride in every single sound I use. I'm always making sure that I'm not using a pre-set or something that everyone else has done.

In modern studios, we're so used to becoming little dictators; you're used to the fascism of having complete control over every element.

Civilization rests on a set of promises; if the promises are broken too often, the civilization dies, no matter how rich it may be, or how mechanically clever. Hope and faith depend on the promises; if hope and faith go, everything goes.

You always come back to Duke Ellington - he's kind of like the thread that holds everything together from the big band descending to lots of jazz, actually.

I dont like Jews. Or colored folk. Or natives, now that you mention it...I bet you like Catholics. Cant stand them either. Nor women, Fabians, Socialists, homosexuals, Asians, or British.

People do things for love and belief and passion, not just because they're paid to do it.

I think this market space, this modern world we're living in, one of its greatest failures is that it can only seem to describe a collective in terms of consumers or clients. It never sees an audience or a community as part of the process. And that's something I'm quite proud of, even if the music is crap.

I think rhythm is, when you talk about rhythmic sensibility, quite perceptive in that I like to have at least one thing that is at least common or familiar to the audience.