Quotes by Brian Eno

When governments rely increasingly on sophisticated public relations agencies, public debate disappears and is replaced by competing propaganda campaigns, with all the accompanying deceits. Advertising isnt about truth or fairness or rationality, but about mobilising deeper and more primitive layers of the human mind.

When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. Thats one of the great feelings - to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.

I periodically realize every few years that the only person whose taste I really trust is me.

I trust my taste. I trust it completely and I always have done, and Ive always thought it isnt that different from everybody elses.

Im very good with technology, I always have been, and with machines in general. They seem not threatening like other people find them, but a source of fun and amusement.

Im always interested in what you can do with technology that people havent thought of doing yet.

You cant really imagine music without technology.

Im always interested in what you can do with technology that people havent thought of doing yet. I think thats sort of a characteristic of the way Ive worked ever since I started.

I think that technology is always invented for historical reasons, to solve a historical problem. But they very soon reveal themselves to be capable of doing things that arent historical that nobody had ever thought of doing before.

You cant have a relationship with a device whose limits are unknown to you, because without limits, it keeps becoming something else.

Instruments sound interesting, not because of their sound, but because of the relationship a player has with them. Instrumentalists build a rapport with their instruments, which is what you like and respond to.

Its not the destination that matters. Its the change of scene.

Id been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that its environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this ambient music. But at the same time I was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way that music changes.

Something Ive realized lately, to my shock, is that I am an optimist, in that I think humans are almost infinitely capable of self-change and self-modification, and that we really can build the future that we want if were smart about it.