Top 150 Annie Lennox Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “I’m not intensely private – I talk a great deal about my life and my work – I just don’t play the game to excess.”

— Annie Lennox

102. “The poetic side of me is Scottish.”

— Annie Lennox

103. “Music is a great vehicle for communications, and I have a certain platform. I have an opportunity and I have to take it.”

— Annie Lennox

104. “We all fight over what the label ‘feminism’ means but for me it’s about empowerment. It’s not about being more powerful than men – it’s about having equal rights with protection, support, justice. It’s about very basic things. It’s not a badge like a fashion item.”

— Annie Lennox

105. “I think people in Great Britain are a bit jaded sometimes.”

— Annie Lennox

106. “I was born in 1954. My parents were brought up in the war years, and life was hard.”

— Annie Lennox

107. “The music scene in the ’70s was like the United Kingdom in the ’70s – we had a lot of unemployment, we had inflation, we had a lot of strikes going on, on a national scale, and a lot of discontent. That was reflected in the music.”

— Annie Lennox

108. “I’m appalled that the word ‘feminism’ has been denigrated to a place of almost ridicule and I very passionately believe the word needs to be revalued and reintroduced with power and understanding that this is a global picture. It isn’t about us and them.”

— Annie Lennox

109. “It’s harder to get out of bed when you’ve failed.”

— Annie Lennox

110. “Although I have lived in London, I have never really considered London my home because it was always going to be a stopping-off point for me, and it has been too.”

— Annie Lennox

111. “Music is an extraordinary vehicle for expressing emotion – very powerful emotions. That’s what draws millions of people towards it. And, um, I found myself always going for these darker places and – people identify with that.”

— Annie Lennox

112. “You have to face things, have faith in what you do and go for it. Think, ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’”

— Annie Lennox

113. “I’ve never been a social person. When I grew up, the other girls would all be combing their hair and exchanging lipstick, and I just couldn’t do that group thing.”

— Annie Lennox

114. “I only want to make music because I have a passion for it.”

— Annie Lennox

115. “My issue with the state of women became incredibly stimulated when I was visiting developing countries and it became obvious that women bore the brunt of so many things in society.”

— Annie Lennox

116. “A lot of music you might listen to is pretty vapid, it doesn’t always deal with our deeper issues. These are the things I’m interested in now, particularly at my age.”

— Annie Lennox

117. “Why are we not valuing the word ‘feminism’ when there is so much work to be done in terms of empowerment and emancipation of women everywhere?”

— Annie Lennox

118. “Anita Roddick was amazing. Her presence in a room was full of light, and everything she worked to achieve still resonates now.”

— Annie Lennox

119. “When things are starting to work, you get up at five in the morning thinking, what are we going to do today? You stay up until one in the morning getting it done, and then you start the next day with the same energy, because it’s working!”

— Annie Lennox

120. “I want people to understand me as a person with views, not just performing songs.”

— Annie Lennox

121. “Pop stars are so busy having a career that they don’t really have a lot of time for activism.”

— Annie Lennox

122. “Making a Christmas album is looked upon by some people as the thing you do when you are heading towards retirement.”

— Annie Lennox

123. “I understand what it is for a woman to want to protect their children and give them the best they can.”

— Annie Lennox

124. “I don’t want to be owned by a corporation and obliged to make a certain type of album. I want to be free.”

— Annie Lennox

125. “I wouldn’t say that I’ve mellowed. I’m less mellow, perhaps.”

— Annie Lennox

126. “There’s a lot of women’s organisations, but they’re all working separately. If you get people together, as a collaborative voice, it’s strong.”

— Annie Lennox

127. “I’ve thought about what is an alternative word to feminism. There isn’t one. It’s a perfectly good word. And it can’t be changed.”

— Annie Lennox

128. “You’re never quite sure where the song is going, because you might not find the word to rhyme with the end of the line. You have to find associative meaning to get you there. So it’s rather like doing a crossword puzzle backwards. A kind of strange, three-dimensional, abstract crossword puzzle.”

— Annie Lennox

129. “As a creative person, you just put something out into the consciousness of the society you live in.”

— Annie Lennox

130. “If people like your music, you can’t guarantee they’re going to love you.”

— Annie Lennox

131. “I can’t understand why the front pages of newspapers can cover bird flu and swine flu and everybody is up in arms about that and we still haven’t really woken up to the fact that so many women in sub-Saharan Africa – 60 percent of people in – infected with HIV are women.”

— Annie Lennox

132. “To try to help people have babies in a healthy way and to celebrate the process of delivering a child which will be healthy is, I think, almost the best part of healthcare.”

— Annie Lennox

133. “I find beauty in a very independent state. It lives quietly. It’s there to be discovered.”

— Annie Lennox

134. “People ask me so many questions.”

— Annie Lennox

135. “Just having medicine isn’t equivalent to medical care. You need the health systems, you need to create the social framework so that people feel safe.”

— Annie Lennox

136. “I was perceiving myself as good as a man or equal to a man and as powerful and I wanted to look ambiguous because I thought that was a very interesting statement to make through the media. And it certainly did cause quite a few ripples and interest and shock waves.”

— Annie Lennox

137. “I like where I live here, in London.”

— Annie Lennox

138. “If I hadn’t been a singer, I might have been a photographer or an artist. But it’s singing I love. I sing all the time, and I feel really good that I’ve expressed myself.”

— Annie Lennox

139. “Every artist has to make their own statements and they have to live with them.”

— Annie Lennox

140. “I think music is the most phenomenal platform for intellectual thought.”

— Annie Lennox

141. “Women’s issues have always been a part of my life. My goal is to bring the word ‘feminism’ back into the zeitgeist and reframe it.”

— Annie Lennox

142. “I used to be obsessed about how I presented myself. I didn’t want other people dressing me because I didn’t want to be treated like a clothes horse.”

— Annie Lennox

143. “The general population still thinks HIV is something that came in the 80s and went away, or that it only affects the gay population or intravenous drug users.”

— Annie Lennox

144. “Over the years, I was never really driven to become a solo artist, but I was curious to find out who I was as an individual creative person. It’s taken some time, but now I feel I’ve truly paid my dues. I guess I’m at a point now where I’m more comfortable in my own skin.”

— Annie Lennox

145. “I also started writing songs because I had this burning activity in my heart and had to express myself.”

— Annie Lennox

146. “You know, I would say that songwriting is something about the expression of the heart, the intellect and the soul.”

— Annie Lennox

147. “There is a big difference between what I do onstage and what I do in my private life. I don’t put my living room on magazine pages.”

— Annie Lennox

148. “You wouldn’t find a Joni Mitchell on ‘X Factor;’ that’s not the place. ‘X Factor’ is a specific thing for people that want to go through that process – it’s a factory, you know, and it’s owned and stitched-up by puppet masters.”

— Annie Lennox

149. “One wouldn’t want to have the same dilemmas at 50 as one had at 15. And indeed I don’t. I have a very different take on life.”

— Annie Lennox

150. “Most women are dissatisfied with their appearance – it’s the stuff that fuels the beauty and fashion industries.”

— Annie Lennox