Benatar Quotes & Sayings

I felt I had a responsibility to do the right thing. And then I wanted to do the right thing by my family and there was no handbook. — Pat Benatar

Each one of us was harmed by being brought into existence. That harm is not negligible, because the quality of even the best lives is very bad - and considerably worse than most people recognize it to be. Although it is obviously too late to prevent our own existence, it is not too late to prevent the existence of future possible people. — David Benatar

I don't care who's on the label, because I have a job to do. — Pat Benatar

Notice, by extension, that in a democracy those committed to non-procreation could never, in the long run, prevail politically against those committed to procreation. — David Benatar

I play ten, twelve weeks out of the year, five times a week, and I really still love to do it. But that's not what I'm interested in doing now. Even though I love it. — Pat Benatar

You're a heartbreaker, dream maker, love taker, don't you mess around with me. — Pat Benatar

The pro-death view should be of interest even to those who do not accept it. One of its valuable features is that it offers a unique challenge to those pro-lifers who reject a legal right to abortion. Whereas a legal pro-choice position does not require a pro-lifer to have an abortion - it allows a choice - a legal pro-life position does prevent a pro-choicer from having an abortion. Those who think that the law should embody the pro-life position might want to ask themselves what they would say about a lobby group that, contrary to my arguments in Chapter 4 but in accordance with pro-lifers' commitment to the restriction of procreative freedom, recommended that the law become pro-death. A legal pro-death policy would require even pro-lifers to have abortions. Faced with this idea, legal pro-lifers might have a newfound interest in the value of choice. — David Benatar

It was very difficult when I was trying to figure out how to have a marriage and babies and do this at the same time. There was no handbook. You were making it up as you went along. — Pat Benatar

I've enjoyed every age I've been, and each has had its own individual merit. Every laugh line, every scar, is a badge I wear to show I've been present, the inner rings of my personal tree trunk that I display proudly for all to see. Nowadays, I don't want a "perfect" face and body; I want to wear the life I've lived. — Pat Benatar

There are things that money can't buy, things like fresh youth to replace the one you've hardly been aware of, things like lost opportunities which might conceivably have led to nothing, but which on the other hand might have led to fulfillment and serenity and new lives and passionate involvement. (Along, of course, with disinheritance!) And human nature being what it is this is the version you'll unquestionably believe. — Stephen Benatar

At fifty. I thought I would be done. I thought I'd be finished by now. So I have no idea. I just leave it. — Pat Benatar

On my view there is no net benefit to coming into existence and thus coming into existence is never worth its costs. — David Benatar

When the first record came out, I'd go down to radio stations pretty much every day to get the record played, and I would walk in and they'd tell us how much they loved the record, but they weren't sure how much they could play it because they were already playing a girl. — Pat Benatar

I never looked at people or singing as commodities. — Pat Benatar

'Hell is for Children' is amazing to do every night and 'Promises in the Dark' and 'Love Is a Battlefied,' of course, but my absolute favorite would be 'Heartbreaker.' It's the one that started everything, so it has a very special place in my heart. And it still rocks every night! It's so fun to do. — Pat Benatar

I don't know who it is, probably some geek - said that when a female gets to a certain age, all her sexuality goes. She's not a vital person anymore. If you're somebody's mother you're not vital. This is such crap, because you're still a person. You still have all the things that you came into childbearing with and all that kind of stuff. — Pat Benatar

When I started it still wasn't okay to be this age and still make this kind of music. And believe me, I consider our stuff to be much poppier than - we're not on like cutting edge, that kind of thing anymore. And even though we're not doing Britney Spears music or Nsync, it's still what I consider to be pop music. So that does give you a little bit more longevity, I guess. But if somebody told me I'd be getting up there and singing "Heartbreaker" at fifty I'd laugh. So I don't know, I have no idea. — Pat Benatar

I'd love to do Pat Benatar. Probably either 'Hit Me with Your Best Shot' or 'We Belong'. — Lauren Cohan

Everything changes all the time, and unfortunately, everyone who knows what you do by buying records only hears a small amount of what's going on in your life. — Pat Benatar

I like Lady Gaga because I like that she pushes the envelope. — Pat Benatar

We live and learn from our mistakes, the deepest cuts are healed by faith. — Pat Benatar

Love and pain become one in the same in the eyes of a wounded child. — Pat Benatar

I spent most of my adult life as someone's mother and the rest of my life trying to make sure that children are safe. So this to me is - we wrote Hell Is For Children in 1979. — Pat Benatar

You have to be true, you have to be honest.. Don't do anything, just figure out what it is that is true to you, what makes you happiest to do and be out there. And if it doesn't work, then you just have to call it a day and go find something else. But don't make it up. Don't go out there and pretend to be something you aren't. — Pat Benatar

It's so hard [to be parent] and no matter how old you get and how experienced you get you're always scared you're going to screw it up and you're going to make a mistake. — Pat Benatar

You can't change the past so don't let it haunt you. You can change the future but first you've got to want to. — Pat Benatar

You're the Picasso of pain. — Pat Benatar

The great times were never as great as they seem in the rearview mirror. — Pat Benatar

Everything that we do I pretty much want to be organic, so if that happens, then that's okay with me. But I'm not interested in trying to re-create what once was. That doesn't interest me; it's boring. — Pat Benatar

And by golly, love sure was a battlefield. Benatar was right about that. — Charlaine Harris

Love is more than a one way reflection, stop using sex as a weapon. — Pat Benatar

Creating new people, by having babies, is so much a part of human life that it is rarely thought even to require a justification. Indeed, most people do not even think about whether they should or should not make a baby. They just make one. In other words, procreation is usually the consequence of sex rather than the result of a decision to bring people into existence. Those who do indeed decide to have a child might do so for any number of reasons, but among these reasons cannot be the interests of the potential child. One can never have a child for that child's sake. — David Benatar

In my early 20s, I had this idea that I was going to front a band, like Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin. I didn't just want to be the chick singing ballads about somebody breaking my heart. Everyone in the business said, 'Why don't you do what Olivia Newton-Jonn and Linda Ronstadt are doing?' But I wanted to sing as a powerful female who wasn't afraid to speak her mind or be sexual. — Pat Benatar

I read somewhere that we are all more than we know. And I really believe that. Everybody is worth something, and think of all the amazing things that you could be to each other, to people you don't even know, of all the things that you could accomplish. — Pat Benatar

We're all scarred. That's how we know we've lived a life worth fighting for. Love is a battlefield! Thank you, Pat Benatar! — J. Sterling

We infrequently contemplate the harms that await any new-born child - pain, disappointment, anxiety, grief, and death. For any given child we cannot predict what form these harms will take or how severe they will be, but we can be sure that at least some of them will occur. None of this befalls the nonexistent. Only existers suffer harm. — David Benatar

There, as usual, she found her husband asleep in the flickering light of MTV. She knelt by the sofa and laid her hand gently on his chest. "Hey," she whispered. "Who's it gonna be? Me or Pat Benatar?" He stirred, rubbing his eyes with the knuckles of his forefinger. "Well?" she prodded. "I'm thinking. — Armistead Maupin

We'll just play it cool, like Elvis at 19. — Pat Benatar

It is curious that while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place. — David Benatar

Those who take their own lives, especially when the quality of those lives is much less bad than those of the cancer patient or the concentration camp prisoner, fly in the face of the normal will to live. They are seen as abnormal, not merely in the statistical sense of being unusual, but of being defective, either morally or psychologically. — David Benatar

When you have children your life - this is my job and that's my life. So it's a totally different thing. They're my priority, they have to be, and they always will be. I have to do them first. So this always gets pushed in the back. — Pat Benatar

Everything must change, everything must move forward. — Pat Benatar

It is unlikely that many people will take to heart the conclusion that coming into existence is always a harm. It is even less likely that many people will stop having children. By contrast, it is quite likely that my views either will be ignored or will be dismissed. As this response will account for a great deal of suffering between now and the demise of humanity, it cannot plausibly be thought of as philanthropic. That is not to say that it is motivated by any malice towards humans, but it does result from a self-deceptive indifference to the harm of coming into existence. — David Benatar

But the soul of touring and the heart of it is basically every day is like putting up a circus tent. — Pat Benatar

When you have girl children they torture you! — Pat Benatar

There are so many young women coming up through the ranks. Adele is an amazing singer. Beyonce has great stage presence. She's just a beautiful woman. I love how everyone has just taken charge of their lives and careers. — Pat Benatar

Finally, the optimist's impatience with or condemnation of pessimism often has a smug macho tone to it (although males have no monopoly of it). There is a scorn for the perceived weakness of the pessimist who should instead 'grin and bear it'. This view is defective for the same reason that macho views about other kinds of suffering are defective. It is an indifference to or inappropriate denial of suffering, whether one's own or that of others. The injunction to 'look on the bright side' should be greeted with a large dose of both scepticism and cynicism. To insist that the bright side is always the right side is to put ideology before the evidence. Every cloud, to change metaphors, may have a silver lining, but it may very often be the cloud rather than the lining on which one should focus if one is to avoid being drenched by self-deception. Cheery optimists have a much less realistic view of themselves than do those who are depressed. — David Benatar

Coming into existence is always bad for those who come into existence. In other words, although we may not be able to say of the never-existent that never existing is good for them, we can say of the existent that existence is bad for them. — David Benatar

I wasn't interested in fabricating things and altering what I did to make hit records. — Pat Benatar

First of all, I'm pretty private about my personal life. — Pat Benatar

Even some rock star girls, which I didn't really know her name. I will probably find out and probably get slaughtered for not knowing her name, but she brought some of her clothes that she used to wear on stage. I wore one of the corsets and stuff. I don't know why I'm blanking. It was not Pat Benatar. It's like Debbie Gibson, Pat Benatar, Joan Jett, I know those girls. — Julianne Hough

You shouldn't have to pay for your love with your bones and your flesh. — Pat Benatar

Each time my mother went psychotic, I hoped it would be the last time. Afterward she would tell me, 'I think that was the final episode. I think I had a breakthrough.' And I would believe-for a few months-that it was true. That she was back to stay. Maybe it was like having a rock star mother who was always on the road. Were there Benatar children? Did they sit around and wonder if their mom's Hell is for Children tour was going to be her last tour? — Augusten Burroughs

The first thing you do at the end is reflect on the beginning. Maybe it's some form of reverse closure, or just the basic human impulse toward sentimentality, or masochism, but as you stand there shell-shocked in the charred ruins of your life, your mind will invariably go back to the time when it all started. And even if you didn't fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will fee like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benatar or The Cure on the soundtrack. — Jonathan Tropper

Some anti-natalist positions are founded on either a dislike of children or on the interests of adults who have greater freedom and resources if they do not have and rear children. My anti-natalist view is different. It arises, not from a dislike of children, but instead from a concern to avoid the suffering of potential children and the adults they would become, even if not having those children runs counter to the interests of those who would have them. — David Benatar

Fulfilled desires, like pleasures (even of the intrinsic kind), are states of achievement rather than default states. For instance, one has to work at satiating oneself, while hunger comes naturally. After one has eaten or taken liquid, bowel and bladder discomfort ensues quite naturally and we have to seek relief. One has to seek out pleasurable sensations, in the absence of which blandness comes naturally. The upshot of this is that we must continually work at keeping suffering (including tedium) at bay, and we can do so only imperfectly. Dissatisfaction does and must pervade life. There are moments, perhaps even periods, of satisfaction, but they occur against a background of dissatisfied striving. Pollyannaism may cause most people to blur out this background, but it remains there. — David Benatar

Pat Benatar might need a rock band, but I can just sit with a blues guitar for an hour and a half and do folk songs and great contemporary ballads, and not many people can pull that off. — Bonnie Raitt

Discussions about the ethics of suicide are immediately biased by the verb that customarily attaches to it in English. One "commits" suicide. Because this presupposes the wrongfulness of the suicide, I avoid that verb, opting instead for "carry out" suicide. This is evaluatively neutral, avoiding both the usual bias against suicide and the unusual bias in favor of it that the verb "achieve" would effect. "Carry out" is preferable to "practice", which implies something ongoing. Finally, "carry out" also implies a suicide that is completed rather than merely attempted. — David Benatar

It's really hard to make records and concentrate and have a free mind, because I have this whole other life. If you don't have kids it's a whole other thing. I think you can be fifty and still have a rock and roll lifestyle; you can still perpetuate that. — Pat Benatar

People's lives change dramatically over such a long time period, and I think that if you're still vital, and you're still interested in writing and things like that, of course your music evolves and reflects where you are in your life. — Pat Benatar

Of course, you're not making records in a vacuum. I'm not making them for myself. It would be nice if I could get more people to hear them. But if I have to sell my soul to the devil to do it, I won't. — Pat Benatar

I wasn't a visionary but I literally had my finger on the pulse of the women of America. — Pat Benatar

If at any moment of the day I ever think I'm remotely cool at all, which is hardly ever, I have two daughters who make sure that never happens. — Pat Benatar

I have different reasons for the way that I react to things now that I have kids. It's not about me, it's about my children going out into this world that makes me say, "What the hell are you all doing?" I have to put them out there, and then I have to worry. — Pat Benatar

Parents with dependents are somehow thought to count for more. If, for example, there is some scarce resource - a donor kidney perhaps - and of the two potential recipients one is a parent of young children and one is not, the parent, all things being equal, will likely be favoured. To let a parent die is not only to thwart that person's preference to be saved, but also the preferences of his or her children that their parent be saved. It is quite true, of course, that the death of the parent will harm more people, but there is nonetheless something to be said against favouring parents. Increasing one's value by having children might be like increasing one's value by taking hostages. — David Benatar

If you're retired, it's a blessing. You know, if you want to keep working and doing what you want to do, it's not a blessing as all - it's a curse. — Pat Benatar

I grew up watching MTV, when Journey was huge, when Pat Benatar had 'Love Is a Battlefield,' and my friends and I used to cut school to watch this woman in the video. We loved Pat Benatar. — Mary J. Blige

Love is a battlefield. — Pat Benatar

Most chick singers say 'if you hurt me, I'll die' ... I say, 'if you hurt me, I'll kick your ass.' — Pat Benatar

I am under no illusions. My position, no matter how clearly stated, is likely to be misunderstood. — David Benatar

I love Katy Perry and Lady GaGa. I think GaGa's pushing the envelope every day and I really like that. — Pat Benatar

I shall not assess arguments and evidence for competing views about when human extinction will occur. We know it will occur, and this fact has a curious effect on my argument. In a strange way it makes my argument an optimistic one. Although things are now not the way they should be - there are people when there should be none - things will someday be the way they should be - there will be no people. In other words, although things are now bad, they will be better, even if they first get worse with the creation of new people. Some may wish to be spared this kind of optimism, but some optimists may take a measure of comfort in this observation. — David Benatar

I love Katy Perry, she is a wonderful pop singer. — Pat Benatar

With the power of conviction, there is no sacrifice. — Pat Benatar

Once I had kids, my whole attitude changed. I was like, "You make a spinal cord from scratch and we'll talk." — Pat Benatar

Before I put another notch in my lipstick case, you better make sure you put me in my place. — Pat Benatar

Never to have been born is best But if we must see the light, the next best Is quickly returning whence we came. When youth departs, with all its follies, Who does not stagger under evils? Who escapes them?
Sophocles'
Sleep is good, death is better; but of course, The best would be never to have been born at all.
Heinrich Heine2 — David Benatar

You don't want to trash what you've done; that's your history. — Pat Benatar

My most important inspirational job that I do is raising those kids. That's my job. And that's where my ambition goes. But I have a life. I'm not only their mother. I'm still who I was before, I just don't get to be it all the time. — Pat Benatar

One particularly poor argument in defence of eating meat is that if humans did not eat animals, those animals would not have been brought into existence in the first place. Humans would simply not have bred them in the numbers they do breed them. The claim is that although these animals are killed, this cost to them is outweighed by the benefit to them of having been brought into existence. This is an appalling argument for many reasons. First, the lives of many of these animals are so bad that even if one rejected my argument one would still have to think that they were harmed by being brought into existence. Secondly, those who advance this argument fail to see that it could apply as readily to human babies that are produced only to be eaten. Here we see quite clearly that being brought into existence only to be killed for food is no benefit. It is only because killing animals is thought to be acceptable that the argument is thought to have any force. — David Benatar