Top 40 Joe Strummer Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The future is unwritten.”

— Joe Strummer

Featured in: Future Quotes, Quotes About Reality

2. “Don’t write slogans, write truths.”

— Joe Strummer

3. “Strummer’s Law: No input, no output.”

— Joe Strummer

4. “Punk rock isn’t something you grow out of Punk rock is an attitude, and the essence of that attitude is ‘give us some truth’”

— Joe Strummer

5. “There is nothing more common than unsuccessful men with talent.”

— Joe Strummer

6. “The way you get a better world is, you don’t put up with substandard anything.”

— Joe Strummer

7. “I’m far more dangerous now, because I don’t care at all.”

— Joe Strummer

8. “We aren’t particularly talented. We try harder!”

— Joe Strummer

9. “The toughest thing is facing yourself. Being honest with yourself, that’s much tougher than beating someone up. That’s what I call tough.”

— Joe Strummer

10. “My motto is, ‘What’s the hurry?’ I’m trying to get it across to the modern world that we need to sit around and think a little bit more.”

— Joe Strummer

11. “When you blame yourself, you learn from it. If you blame someone else, you don’t learn nothing, cause hey, it’s not your fault, it’s his fault, over there.”

— Joe Strummer

12. “People can change anything they want to, and that means everything in the world.”

— Joe Strummer

13. “Without people, you’re nothing.”

— Joe Strummer

14. “I like to read because it’s the opposite of being on the go. Reading is the perfect antidote.”

— Joe Strummer

15. “Greed, it ain’t going anywhere. They should have that in a big billboard across Times Square. Without people you’re nothing.”

— Joe Strummer

16. “Everyone has got to realise you can’t hold onto the past if you want any future. Each second should lead to the next one.”

— Joe Strummer

17. “In fact, punk rock means exemplary manners to your fellow human beings.”

— Joe Strummer

18. “All the power’s in the hands of people rich enough to buy it.”

— Joe Strummer

19. “It is fun to be alive. It’s a hell of a lot better than being dead.”

— Joe Strummer

20. “I don’t have any other message than don’t forget you are alive.”

— Joe Strummer

21. “There is a time to dance to techno and a time not to.”

— Joe Strummer

22. “With The Simpsons you can go back to work with a keen heart.”

— Joe Strummer

23. “Authority is supposedly grounded in wisdom, but I could see from a very early age that authority was only a system of control and it didn’t have any inherent wisdom. I quickly realised that you either became a power or you were crushed.”

— Joe Strummer

24. “A lot of the time I’m semi-insane, but there is a slight bit of intelligence there.”

— Joe Strummer

25. “When you’re out to get the honey you don’t go killing all the bees.”

— Joe Strummer

26. “Nonsmokers should be banned from buying any product a smoker created.”

— Joe Strummer

27. “I don’t want to look back. I want to keep going forward, I still have something to say to people.”

— Joe Strummer

28. “You have the right not to be killed, unless it was done by a policeman or an aristocrat.”

— Joe Strummer

29. “If you ain’t thinkin about man and God and law, then you ain’t thinkin about nothin’.”

— Joe Strummer

30. “I like to just feel how I feel and not worry about it really.”

— Joe Strummer

31. “I have a weird life because I live on songwriting royalties, which are a strange income. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it doesn’t.”

— Joe Strummer

32. “You’ve gotta be slightly stupid.”

— Joe Strummer

33. “Yeah, all those things, responsibility, pressure. It’s a bit stressful. I try and come to terms with it by not thinking about it.”

— Joe Strummer

34. “For me the music is a vehicle for my lyrics. It’s a chance to get some really good words across.”

— Joe Strummer

35. “There isn’t a town in the world I haven’t run amok in.”

— Joe Strummer

36. “If I had five million pounds I’d start a radio station because something needs to be done. It would be nice to turn on the radio and hear something that didn’t make you feel like smashing up the kitchen and strangling the cat.”

— Joe Strummer

37. “We’re all going to have to learn to live together and develop a greater tolerance and get rid off whatever our fathers gave us in the way of hatred between nations.”

— Joe Strummer

38. “All hippies around now just represent complete apathy.”

— Joe Strummer

39. “If they can’t hear it, they’re not supposed to hear it. It’s not for them if they can’t understand it.”

— Joe Strummer

40. “I think we’re going to have to forget about the radio and just go back to word of mouth.”

— Joe Strummer

41. “The only place I considered home was the boarding school, in Yorkshire, my parents sent me to.”

— Joe Strummer

42. “I want to grow up with my audience. I don’t expect to be getting through to the younger pop crowd. I learned that from Paul Simon.”

— Joe Strummer

43. “The hippy movement was a failure.”

— Joe Strummer

44. “Anybody who makes speeches written by someone else is just a robot.”

— Joe Strummer

45. “I’m kind of like one of those people that picks up small and interesting bits of wood and doesn’t want to let go of them. Or, you know, I’m fascinated with the wrapper on a sardine can. A little cuckoo.”

— Joe Strummer

46. “You ain’t alive and kicking unless you’re fighting.”

— Joe Strummer