Democracy won't work if we're asleep...It's a wicked world and we're all in it/But that could change in a New York minute...So pray for peace until you're hoarse/And maybe fear will run its course.

[And how did he recover the patience that allowed him to await the arrival of songs for his 21st century trio of brilliant, contemplative, philosophical and socially conscious albums?] I just walked away from [the commercial career] and let it dismantle itself, ... I bit the bullet and crossed over that threshold to the realization that I may not be a big star in this thing. Maybe my path is something else. So I just started driving my kids to school and looking out after them. I stumbled onto a fantastic woman and built a relationship and became more solid inside myself and went back to work with a different mind-set, which is to please myself, because it's the only way I can be original.

To me, the outsider is God, ... If you take extreme fundamentalist Muslims, who believe it's sent down from Allah that destroying the infidel is their duty, and then if you take the extreme fundamentalists on the Christian right, God got disenfranchised somewhere in that deal a long, long time ago. The minute you start saying 'I'm the only one that's right,' you have lost it, as far as I'm concerned.

I don't think it will ever be my style to take a big mallet and just ... bust the window with it, ... I have to get there in a more subtle way.

I wanted to dismantle any show-business pretense and take this thing straight as a human being, ... So I said, 'I'm gonna write this, and where I think I'm great, I'm gonna say it, and where I think I'm not, I'm gonna say it. And I'm gonna try to love and accept myself along the way.'

We did a show in New York the other day, and after we played The Obscenity Prayer , a woman came up to me and said, 'I'm buying your record as soon as it comes out, because the Dixie Chicks can kiss my (expletive), too!'