Creativity Quote by Keith Richards

Keith Richards doesn’t romanticize rebellion as a mood; he frames it as a contact sport. “Kick authority in the teeth” is cartoon-violent on purpose, the kind of image that belongs in a bar story or a tabloid headline. It’s not a manifesto, it’s a posture: if you’re going to challenge power, don’t do it timidly, don’t do it halfway, and don’t pretend you’re just “asking questions.” The punchline is “two feet,” a small twist that turns bravado into strategy. One foot is a gesture; two feet is commitment. It’s also band logic: rebellion works better when it’s doubled, amplified, backed by rhythm and volume.

The subtext is Richards’ lifelong allergy to respectability. As a Rolling Stone, he helped sell a new kind of celebrity where friction with cops, censors, and gatekeepers wasn’t a scandal so much as part of the brand. The line carries the learned cynicism of someone who’s watched “authority” constantly shift masks: government, the music industry, moral panic, even the polite PR machinery that tries to tame artists into content. He’s saying that power is sturdy, teeth included, so your opposition has to be equally physical, equally unapologetic.

Context matters: this is post-’60s rock as an institution, when rebellion was already being commodified. Richards’ answer is to outpace the commodification by going harder than the system can comfortably package. It’s not that resistance is pure; it’s that half-resistance is useless.