Russell Brand Quotes

The utilities and facilities of major corporations can be confiscated and given to democratic collectives

I say us - obviously I don't vote as I believe democracy is a pointless spectacle where we choose between two indistinguishable political parties, neither of whom represent the people but the interest of powerful business elites that run the world.

My mate Karl once told me he'd been looking after this five-year-old boy who – not knowing enough to have an ironic inflection to his words – said, 'I want something.' He didn't know what it was. Not 'I want sweets', or 'a can of Coke', or 'to watch the Tweenies', or whatever it is they're into now (I like Bagpuss), but 'I want something.' All of us, I think, have that feeling. And what heroin does when you first start taking it is tell you what that something is.

I live in negotiation with a shadow side that has to be respected.

Where those two energies [male and female energies] intersect, all creativity is possible. We already have divine creative energy within us. And what is the most powerful of these energies? The energy that patriarchy and misogyny constantly try to repress. The divine female sexual energy. The creative energy of the female. That is why I worship divine sexual female energy.

Imagining the overthrow of the current political system is the only way I can be enthused about politics.

My mum brought me up on her own. All we really had was each other.

Amy Winehouse - her surname's beginning to sound like a description of her liver.

I want to change the world, and do something valuable and beautiful. I want people to remember me before I'm dead, and then more afterwards.

I cannot control the past but I can control the present through forgiveness.

Oh no, my brain is broken.

Every moment is a fresh new beginning, a wonderful inauguration of the great cosmic journey through the universe. We can do whatever we want. We can change reality at any moment.

What should happen is a little voice in your head, like Jimmy Cricket in Pinocchio, will go 'But Russell, that bird, that's a creature like you, if you kill it it'll be all sad' and you go 'F***, alright. I won't kill it then.'

This is no time for drinking a mug of water - which you would do nowhere else in the world. A mug of water! You just don't drink water from mugs, do ya? Except on the telly. Water out of a mug! Should be a hot drink ... mug of water.

Drugs and alcohol are not my problem - reality is my problem. Drugs and alcohol are my solution.

The truth is: there is on this frequency, from our human perspective, a planet, some beings, some resources; would it not be sensible to employ systems that benefit the planet, the beings, and the resources?

Rituals are missing nowadays

Socialism isn't a dirty word; it just means sharing. Really, it's just the bureaucratic arm of Christianity.

If you're a drug addict, then you've always got drugs, so you're a criminal. So you're gonna get into problems.

Our social and economic systems are so devoid of humanity and love.

Imagine the wisdom to be passed down from the classical Buddhist texts.

Mark Twain, the thinking man's Colonel Sanders, reputedly said, America is New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco. Everywhere else is Cleveland.

For me, it's standard. I don't feel irresponsible for telling kids not to vote; I feel like I deserve a Blue Peter badge for not telling them to riot. For not telling them that they are entitled to destroy the cathedrals of tyranny erected to mock them in the heart of their community. That they should rise up and destroy the system that imprisons them, ignores them, condemns and maligns them. By any means necessary.

I don't know if this is the kind of retrospective analysis that people are fond of applying to their work or actions, but it feels like I knew I was going to be famous and I knew that an element of that would be traumatic, so that if I could make myself something big and otherworldly, it would be a kind of defence.

I have no power at all over people, places and things, and if I ever for a moment mistakenly believe that I do, and act as if I do, pain is on its way.

Honesty has always been an integral part of my operation, really.

The thing for me is, what if one returns to these maxims, these rather simplistic maxims "Be the change you want to see in the world." Because what canvas have we but the self for these kind of explorations, ultimately.

Of all the consumer products, chewing gum is perhaps the most ridiculous: it literally has no nourishment – you just chew it to give yourself something to do with your stupid idiot Western mouth.

Half the world is starving, and the other's going, 'I don't actually need any nutrition, but it would be good to masticate, just to keep my mind off things.

It is difficult to feel sympathy for these people. It is difficult to regard some bawdy drunk and see them as sick and powerless. It is difficult to suffer the selfishness of a drug addict who will lie to you and steal from you and forgive them and offer them help. Can there be any other disease that renders its victims so unappealing? Would Great Ormond Street be so attractive a cause if its beds were riddled with obnoxious little criminals that had brought it on themselves?

In spite of the anguish my addiction to drugs and alcohol has caused me, I wouldn't relinquish its lessons

I think that there is an infinite creative force that generates all consciousness and all matter and we are all connected and if you align yourself with this infinite creative force then you can be positive and you can be beautiful, I don't think its a person or god , I don't believe in any particular doctrine or dogma, only that humanity is connected.

Consciousness does affect matter.

We all need something to help us unwind at the end of the day. You might have a glass of wine, or a joint, or a big delicious blob of heroin to silence your silly brainbox of its witterings but there has to be some form of punctuation, or life just seems utterly relentless.

I've never had a sustained period of medication for mental illness when I've not been on other drugs as well. It's just not something that I particularly feel I need. I know that I have dramatically changing moods, and I know sometimes I feel really depressed, but I think that's just life. I don't think of it as, "Ah, this is mental illness," more as, "Today, life makes me feel very sad." I know I also get unnaturally high levels of energy and quickness of thought, but I'm able to utilize that.

A small minority cannot control an uncooperative majority, so they must be distracted, divided, tyrannized, or anesthetized into compliance.

Even as a junkie I stayed true [to vegetarianism] - 'I shall have heroin, but I shan't have a hamburger.' What a sexy little paradox.

The most insightful thing I ever heard, was overheard. I was waiting for a rail replacement bus in Hackney Wick. These two old women weren't even talking to me - not because I'd offended them, I hadn't, I'd been angelic at that bus stop, except for the eavesdropping. Rail replacement buses take an eternity, because they think they're doing you a favour by covering for the absent train, you've no recourse.
Eventually the bus appeared, on the distant horizon, and one of the women, with the relief and disbelief that often accompanies the arrival of public transport said, 'Oh look, the bus is coming.' The other woman - a wise woman, seemingly aware that her words and attitude were potent and poetic enough to form the final sentence in a stranger's book - paused, then said, 'The bus was always coming.

Since Steve Jobs died I cannot bear to see anyone use an iPhone irreverently, what I did was a tribute to his memory.

WHEN I STILL USED, I WAS ONCE WORKING IN IBIZA, HEDONISM capital of the nineties and the turn of the millennium. People swayed in sweaty swathes and stayed, pilled-up for days. I couldn't participate, because I was too shy or broken, caught on some taut barbed wire in my mind. Me and my mate Matt, high one night, lost ourselves, found ourselves in a wood and pretended to be animals. It was just us, and we prowled and circled around. We locked eyes and growled and danced. "Let's pretend we're animals" was forgotten, and we were animals. We are animals. We are free animals with a divine spark, we're not in a farm or a zoo or a theme park, we're free. We've forgotten that we're free.

Thus another friendship was dashed on the cruel rocks amid the storm of my self-destruction.

Princeton University recently did a study revealing what those of us paying attention already know all too well: The United States is, in scientifically proven fact, not a democracy. They concluded that the U.S. is controlled by economic elites. This is a prominent idea that is becoming popular. The structural reason that voting is redundant is that through the funding of political parties, lobbying, and cronyism, corporations are able to ensure that their interests are prioritized above the needs of the electorate and that ideas that contravene their agenda don't even make it into the sphere of public debate. Whoever you vote for, you'll be voting for a party that represents a big-business agenda, not the will of the people.

I deplore those long brown curly fingernail folk. I don't even especially like people who have one long thumbnail for guitar. My mate Karl has one, and it scratched me the other day. I was sickened.

When people are content they are difficult to manoeuvre. We are perennially discontent and offered placebos as remedies.

It's no wonder Bob Geldof knows so much about famine - he's been dining out on I Don't Like Mondays for 30 years,

I used to binge-eat and make myself throw up. I was a fat kid. Obviously I didn't quite master the bulimia.

There's no biological reason why a man shouldn't just try to have sex with every woman he meets - all of them get pregnant and your genetics are winning.

I enjoyed having a reputation as being wild, but these days I try not to worry about what people think in the privacy of their own brain or what they write in the bizarre publicity of their own newspapers, because all of those things are meaningless.

People don't throw your bags out of windows because of lies; they throw them out because of the truth.

Have you considered that the Bible, like all religious doctrine, may be allegorical and symbolic, to direct us toward one holy entity of love, as opposed to a simplistic litiginous text to direct the behavior of human beings?

I liked Bugs Bunny. He was pretty good. He's annoying as a duck and he's anti-proletarian. Daffy Duck I couldn't see what was going on with him. He seemed like he was angry about something. My favorite one though is Pinocchio. I liked that kid. He was made of wood. I liked that for a start. I also liked how he'd tell a lie and his nose would grow. I liked the morality of that.

My dad's philosophy was (and I think still is) that life is a malevolent force, which seeks to destroy you, and you have to struggle with it. Only those who are hard enough will succeed. Most people get crushed, but if you fight, in the end life will go, Fucking hell. This one's serious. Let him through.

I used to believe in the system that I was born into: aspire, acquire, consume, get famous and glamorous, get high and mighty, get paid and laid.

When I was growing up, I thought I'd be a lot happier if I was famous and successful and if I had money.

Maybe a life of devotion doesn't need to be robes and chanting; maybe it's just going through life with open eyes and an open mind, looking out for chances to help people and buzz on the altruistic zip it gives, like coins in Mario Land.

I really love to be with people. It's nice, that. To have achieved sudden intimacy with strangers is perhaps the most human thing you can do. We all love our friends and families, as much as we hate them. When you can achieve intimacy with strangers, it's very exciting and heartening.

we must remember the objective is simple: to make life on the planet, and for the planet, better. To

I really, really love children and I think probably among children is when I feel mostly berated. It's not like I feel like oh, there's some children here. I have to tone it down. I go nuts with children especially when I ain't got none. So when I'm round my mates' children, I jest them kids up first. I swear at them, I get more worked up, I say crazy stuff to them, fill their heads with nonsense and then I leave them.

Today's 'Sesame Street' will NOT be brought to you by the number 34 or the letter D.

We continue to be spilled on by consumerism even though we know it doesn't make us happy.

It was crushingly disappointing as a fan of The Simpsons to discover that it's just you in a room speaking into a microphone. I thought I was going to become friends with Homer Simpson, but unfortunately none of them are real.

We are at a turning point; the exploitation has now reached a pitch where the disenfranchised and exploited can look to a culpable minority with vengeful eyes. This minority, though, cannot be defined by the color of their skin but by the color of their god. Green.

So we are not discussing whether or not debt cancellation is a possibility; we know it is, we've seen it, they've done it. All we are discussing is who it is possible for. Them or us. I've just typed myself into a revolutionary fervor again. Every so often the fury at injustice rises up in me and makes me want to smash something or burn something, but nothing in my immediate environment belongs to me so I have to refrain.

We thought it was nice of you to let him have a go, because, in England, he wouldn't be trusted with a pair of scissors.

Amy [Winehouse] increasingly became defined by her addiction. Our media though is more interested in tragedy than talent, so the ink began to defect from praising her gift to chronicling her downfall. The destructive personal relationships, the blood soaked ballet slippers, the aborted shows, that YouTube madness with the baby mice. In the public perception this ephemeral tittle-tattle replaced her timeless talent. This and her manner in our occasional meetings brought home to me the severity of her condition. Addiction is a serious disease; it will end with jail, mental institutions, or death.

In the end the British will walk out because 100,000 British cannot control 350 million Indians if those Indians refuse to cooperate. A small minority cannot control an uncooperative majority, so they must be distracted, divided, tyrannized, or anesthetized into compliance. Gandhi dealt with the colonization of nations by nations; we deal now with the colonization of consciousness by corporations.

Society is collapsing, and people are starting to recognize that the reason they feel like they're mentally ill is that they're living in a system that's not designed to suit the human spirit.

What I liked about it is in the world of children, there are very, very different rules and a kind of naivete and innocence and sweetness that's been beautifully captured, I think, by this film as you can even see [gesturing toward the film's poster on display nearby] from this gorgeous artwork.

The mentality and behavior of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless over their addiction and unless they have structured help, they have no hope.

I don't see why someone should lose their life just so you can have a snack.

And I don't think we should be continuing to propagate the idea that famous people are magical or special because it makes people feel like their lives ain't no good.

Are there things about yourself which you have never told anyone? Way back upon the creaky floors of your childhood, in your solitude, the shadows of your private mind, the things you've done and said and thought that compound and contain you: shameful things, sexual things, often solitary acts, but sometimes not, sometimes agonizing stabs of cruelty you've inflicted on people you love, or the moments where reality itself seemed to tear as they looked into your eyes and told you 'you are nothing'. And for a moment you stand there adjusting to the pain, the pain that someone could say that to you, and what that must mean about who you are.

When you fall in love you recognise you're not the most important person in the world, and your focus becomes another person.

I get fixated when I'm bleeding
I can see why they went in for blood-letting in the medieval times because it makes you feel a bit better. When I cut myself, the drama of it calms me down.

I've always had this impulse to be destructive.

I always felt I was rather too clever for something like a 'program for living', certainly one that had any religious overtones. It's not that I thought that religion was 'the opiate of the masses', if it was, I would've had some, I loved opium. It's that I thought it was dumb. Drab, dry, dumb, shouty, hysterical, dumb. Small-town dumb. Foreign dumb.

It was in these sessions that I first came across the "To my shame" technique ... You can get away with any admission, however appalling, so long as it's preceded by the words "to my shame."
... The self-accusatory prefix robs the listener of the right to disapprove ...
SANS "TO MY SHAME."
I used to exploit women because I couldn't cope with being alone ...
CORRECT RESPONSE. He didn't say "to my shame!" You bastard! You viscious selfish bastard.
It's like "Simon Says" for junkies.

I don't like doing anything that makes you sweat if you don't come at the end of it.

I'll not be changing, but America will.

You've seen their logo - it's an apple with a bite taken out of it. That bite is the symbol of the moment mankind broke their pact with God, transgressed their own innocent nature, and chewed into consuming and consumerism. We have externalized all wonder, materialized our inherent magic.

I'm into yoga, I meditate all the time, I'm vegetarian.

Turns out it was mostly a lie. But, at least for a short while, it was a beautiful one.

What I've learnt - to my cost - on several occasions in my life, is that people will put up with all manner of bad behaviour so long as you're giving them what they want. They'll laugh and get into it and enjoy the anecdotes and the craziness and the mayhem as long as you're going your job well, but the minute you're not, you're fucked. They'll wipe their hands of you without a second glance.

All we can do is adapt the way we view this condition, not as a crime or a romantic affectation but as a disease that will kill. We need to review the way society treats addicts, not as criminals but as sick people in need of care.

The way I've been with drink and drugs suggests I have a tendency to get addicted to things.

One of the great sadnesses of modern life, because of our disenfranchisement and disillusionment with religion, is that we don't have access to these ideas. Yoga and meditation, for me, is a way of, in this secular world, accessing very very beautiful principles that would perhaps make us happier, at a time when people feel disillusioned with the economy, concerned about the ecology, worried with politicians, and don't trust what they're being told on television.

I've learned that it is important to be beautiful to people. That all that matters is that you are lovely to the people around you and the people that you meet. It doesn't matter if you're a show off or a little bit vain, as long as you're good to your mum, and that you're kind, and that you're lovely. And that everything is transient and superficial and to not get attached to material things because you're going to lose it all. And the only thing that is constant is love.

If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one's enemies.

I think, you're not blagging me on this ridiculous journey, with this bit of paper. I think if you want to change things, it's not with an X on a piece of paper, it's with an X on someone's forehead.

The best thing you can do is fall in love. My life has been changed by falling in love.

I know that's the sort of thing people say and I really hate it when people say the sort of things people say. I always think, 'You don't mean that, you just think it sounds good.

I'm not better than you; I'm just different than you in a way that's better.

Oh, and 13.1 million American people had their homes foreclosed. Because their debt, it turns out, was real; it was only the debt within the financial sector that was imaginary. It was only the people who generated the crisis who got three magical wishes from an economic genie. There was no abracadabra for ordinary people; they just got abraca-fucked.

We are imprisoned within, hypnotized without, denying ourselves access to the internal peace and external harmony. Can we execute the perfect jailbreak when we have become our own jailers?

The police force in America pledge to "protect and serve." That would actually be dandy if it were happening. Bill Hicks used to joke that he'd like to hijack a typically unpunctual plane and force it to go to its scheduled destination on time.

Organize society effectively. The capitalist system is not the result of our collective greed; it is the manifestation of the greed of a few and the manipulation of the many. A global superstructure has been established to

I'm buying things for people I don't even know. I'm like Willy Wonka, but more manipulative. Imagine if Willy Wonka had a devious goal.

There was [really] little difference between someone acting throwing french fries in your face and someone throwing french fries in your face.

As a person ... I'm a little more doubtful, introspective and analytical.

Normally, I'm good at first dates, 'cause that's the only date I ever have, so I know how to control it and be confident.

Her death had a powerful impact on me I suppose because it was such an obvious shock, like watching someone for hours through a telescope advance towards you, fist extended with the intention of punching you in the face. Even though I saw it coming it still hurt when it eventually hit me.