The Tao of Ozzy Osbourne

Cypress · Jul 26, 2025

The Tao of Ozzy Osbourne

As anyone who remembers MTV’s The Osbournes can attest, Ozzy Osbourne, who died Tuesday at 76, had a way with words. It didn’t matter if he was walking offstage after playing to 50,000 fans or sitting at his house struggling to work the TV remote, the metal pioneer always managed to come up with a turn of phrase that was both hilarious and unexpectedly wise.

“I’m just Dad. It’s kind of a fucked-up life, really. A rock star is supposed to say, ‘Get me the Vicodins!’ Or, ‘Run me a bath in fucking Perrier water!’ I get fucking dog shit up to the elbows and an earful of fucking abuse.”

“The thing about life that gets me crazy is that by the time you learn it all, it’s too late to deal with it. It should be the other way around. We should be born with all this sense and knowledge, and then get stupider as we get older.”

“But if I feel this show is fucking my family up — if I find my son freebasing — I will say, ‘You can kiss my ass. I don’t want to have a TV show and bury two kids at the end of it.’ The most important thing for me is the love I have for my family. I love them more than life itself.”

“Randy [Rhoads] was too young and too nice a guy to die. It’s always the assholes in the world who live to 199.”

"We’d get invitations to play witches’ conventions and black masses in Highgate Cemetery. I honestly thought it was a joke. We were the last hippie band — we were into peace.”

“I got rabies shots for biting the head off a bat, but that’s OK — the bat had to get Ozzy shots.”

“I hate vacuum cleaners. They make the most nauseating fucking racket in the world, like a dying wildebeest being dragged up and down the corridor.”

“Sometimes I’m scared of being Ozzy. But it could have been worse; I could have been Sting.”

“I’m not in the band anymore because of musical differences. They were musical. I was different.”