"In order to change the world, you have to get your head together first"
About this Quote
Coming from Hendrix, the line carries the late-60s tension between outward revolt and inner liberation. This is an era obsessed with consciousness: psychedelics, Eastern philosophy, civil rights, Vietnam, the idea that a new mind could produce a new society. Hendrix stood at the crossroads of that optimism and its exhaustion. His music sounded like technological apocalypse and intimate confession at the same time, and this quote has the same dual wiring. “Head” is cognition, but it’s also vibe, identity, and chemical weather. “Together” implies fragmentation: the self as a scattered band that needs to sync up before it can play anything coherent.
The subtext is a critique of performative radicalism before we had the term. If your inner life is incoherent, your politics becomes noise: reactive, brittle, easily hijacked. Hendrix isn’t dismissing collective struggle; he’s warning that the loudest visions fail when they’re built on unexamined chaos. It’s a surprisingly disciplined message from a figure often mythologized as pure wildfire: before you try to remake the world’s amplifiers, tune your own instrument.
Quote Details
| Topic | Self-Improvement |
|---|---|
| Source | Jimi Hendrix — quote "In order to change the world, you have to get your head together first" (attributed; listed on Wikiquote). |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Hendrix, Jimi. (2026, January 18). In order to change the world, you have to get your head together first. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/in-order-to-change-the-world-you-have-to-get-your-7886/
Chicago Style
Hendrix, Jimi. "In order to change the world, you have to get your head together first." FixQuotes. January 18, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/in-order-to-change-the-world-you-have-to-get-your-7886/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"In order to change the world, you have to get your head together first." FixQuotes, 18 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/in-order-to-change-the-world-you-have-to-get-your-7886/. Accessed 13 Feb. 2026.











