If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest or some guy on TV telling you how to do your shit, then YOU DESERVE IT.

Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.

Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.

There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.

The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.

My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is: Keep him or her as far away from a church as you can.

Scientology, how about that? You hold on to the tin cans and then this guy asks you a bunch of questions, and if you pay enough money you get to join the master race. How's that for a religion? To a concert audience at the Rockpile, Toronto, May 1969.

My theory is that music is good, it's the only religion that delivers the goods. And anybody who wants to hear any kind of music is entitled to hear that music because it's good for you – it makes you feel good. If you like it, go for it. Just because I don't like it doesn't mean anything – it's a matter of personal taste.

There is no hell. There is only France.

Children are naïve -- they trust everyone. School is bad enough, but, if you put a child anywhere in the vicinity of a church, you're asking for trouble.

The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way, and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre. 1977

The first thing you have to do if you want to raise nice kids, is you have to talk to them like they are people instead of talking to them like they're property. Frank Zappa on Howard Stern, 1987

When god created Republicans, he gave up on everything else.

There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another.

You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.

The biggest threat to America today is not communism. It's moving America toward a fascist theocracy, and everything that's happened during the Reagan administration is steering us right down that pipe ... When you have a government that prefers a certain moral code derived from a certain religion and that moral code turns into legislation to suit one certain religious point of view, and if that code happens to be very, very right wing, almost toward Attila the Hun... 1986 appearance on Crossfire (TV series)

On a personal level, Freaking Out is a process whereby an individual casts off outmoded and restricting standards of thinking, dress, and social etiquette in order to express creatively his relationship to his immediate environment and the social structure as a whole. Zappa's liner notes for 'Freak Out'

The disgusting stink of a too loud electric guitar; now that's my idea of a good time.

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.