Creativity Quote by Frank Zappa

Zappa lands a gut-punch with the casual certainty of a guy who’s spent too long watching people turn their personal taste into moral law. “Everybody believes in something” sounds like a warm truism until he tightens the screw: belief isn’t just a set of ideas, it’s scaffolding. You don’t hold convictions; you live inside them. The line “by virtue of the fact” is doing sly work here, making belief feel less like a noble choice and more like an unavoidable biological function, as basic as hunger. He’s not praising faith; he’s diagnosing dependence.

The subtext is Zappa’s long-running allergy to sanctimony. In his world, “something” could be God, patriotism, a subculture, a genre, a conspiracy, a “scene.” The point is that the object hardly matters. What matters is the psychological use: we recruit belief to justify our presence, to give a story to our desires, failures, and appetites. Belief becomes less a compass than a survival narrative. That’s why the sentence avoids specifics; naming a belief would let the reader argue content. Zappa’s aim is structural: everyone is propping themselves up on an idea, and the self-serving part is built in.

Context helps. Coming out of the late-60s/70s counterculture and then raging through the culture wars of the 80s (including his very public fights over censorship), Zappa saw how quickly “freedom” and “decency” became costumes people wore to claim authority. The quote reads like a warning: watch how beliefs function socially. They’re rarely just true-or-false; they’re tools for existing loudly, and for demanding space.