David Geffen

From the day I arrived, California seemed like an enchanted land.

Are you threatening me? If you so much as touch me I’ll have you arrested!

[In 1972] At the moment, we’re getting the same thrill from seeing the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Jo Jo Gunne, and Judee Sill happen… It’s as hard to do it with Jackson Browne as it was to do it with Joni five years ago.

If you’re successful, people will talk about you. There’s nothing you can do about it. People make up stories.

Why not blame the libraries? They’re full of violent books.

[On Laura Nyro] Anything she wanted, I wanted to get for her.

In fact, in my view, if the managers of the propaganda system were more intelligent, they would allow more leeway to real dissidents and critics. Because it still wouldn’t make much of a difference, given the overwhelming weight of propaganda on the other side…

Protest actions and propaganda are two slightly different things.

Real liberty exists only there where exploitation has been annihilated, where no oppression of some peoples by others exists, where there is no unemployment and pauperism, where a person does not tremble because tomorrow he may lose his job, home and bread.

The profusion of government … [has] retarded the natural progress.

I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.

Russian democracy is the power of the Russian people with their own traditions of national self-government, and not the realisation of standards foisted on us from outside.

While capital is now highly mobile, labor is increasingly immobile – and that has immediate consequences. It means that it is easy to shift production to low-wage, high-repression areas of the world with low environmental standards.

I would prefer to abandon the terminology of the past. ‘Superpower’ is something which we used during the cold war time. Why use it now?

I think it’s fine when the mayor of the biggest city in Russia consults the president.

Since Jimmy Carter, religious fundamentalists play a major role in elections. He was the first president who made a point of exhibiting himself as a born again Christian. That sparked a little light in the minds of political campaign managers: Pretend to be a religious fanatic and you can pick up a third of the vote right away. Nobody asked whether Lyndon Johnson went to church every day. Bill Clinton is probably about as religious as I am, meaning zero, but his managers made a point of making sure that every Sunday morning he was in the Baptist church singing hymns.

They think because they have put my husband on an island that he will be forgotten. They are wrong. The harder they try to silence him, the louder I will become!

An IMF study that investigated the profits of American banks…found that they were almost entirely dependent on implicit public subsidies. There’s a kind of a guarantee – it’s not on paper, but it’s an implicit guarantee – that if they get into trouble they will be bailed out.

Thousands of mercenaries, who have trained in camps on the territory of Chechnya as well as come in from abroad, are actually preparing to impose extremist ideas on the whole world.

[on Trump] I’m puzzled by that. People who do it are inflicting damage to the country’s domestic political situation, incapacitating the president and showing a lack of respect to voters who cast their ballots for him.

The Recovery Act is working, but it’s going to continue to work. It’s not over. A lot’s going to happen this summer. And even after the summer, there’s more to come with the act.