Johnny Cash Quotes

Depending on your political orientation, the Dixie Chicks are either the great defenders of free speech or American traitors.

I felt bad about the controversy because they stopped playing my songs on American radio stations. But there was nothing wrong with what I did. Now everybody sings the national anthem the way they want.

When you think 'Peaky Blinders,' when it first began it got mixed reviews and people didn't know what to do with it, and it was like: 'Why is there modern music on this?' So I think whenever you do something different you're going to get that response.

Clive [Davis] tried to tell me that saying certain words in a song - or as he says, 'putting some balls into it' - isn't bad, it's just strong emotion. Well, there are certain words and emotions I don't want kids hearing, and I'm not changing because they think it's going to sell better. This is going to sound horrible, but I got 12 million votes doing what I did.

That’s the problem with falling in love. It makes you start talking like a bad country song

I guess the majority of people who want to ban certain musicians are the ones who are so proud of everything America stands for.

In country music, one of the ways we may have gone wrong in the past is trying to be politically correct all the time.

I think carrying moral baggage is very dangerous for an artist. If you have a duty, it's to be true and not cover up the cracks.

I think my first album opened a lot of doors for me to push the freedom of speech to the limit.

You see, the people that have a point of view and have an opinion and have some intellect are dangerous in the film community - they're dangerous.

We're one of the only bands that get censored for theological commentary.

There's a time where people were out holding posters in protest outside shows I was doing, and thankfully, we've moved past that. And a lot of country stations wouldn't play me. They were more conservative than I was.

Lives are destroyed by many things. They are destroyed by anti-racism too, as Ray Honeyford's was.

I don't like politics in music.

If I choose to direct something, it's because I don't think it would get accepted.

I'm like Madonna, I'm not afraid to offend.

Won't you help to sing these songs of freedom? 'Cause all I ever have… redemption songs; redemption songs.

In our country there's never been a successful progressive struggle that did not have a soundtrack, whether it was the civil rights movement, workers' rights movement, women's rights movement. There's got to be songs at the barricades, and those are the kinds of songs that I try to write.

From the start, I've always admired Eminem's thinking. That's the reason I wanted to appear on the Grammys with him when I was asked. Eminem has the balls to say what he feels and to make offensive things funny. That's very necessary today in America, with people being muzzled and irony becoming a lost art. Artists like Eminem who use their free speech to get a point across are vitally important. There just aren't many people in the world with balls that big and talent that awesome.

Technology is mechanical and contrary to the emotions that inform a person's life. The country music field has especially been hit hard by this. All my songs have been written by people who went out of fashion years ago. Just like da Vinci and Renoir and van Gogh. Nobody paints like that anymore. But it can't be wrong to try.

Tax not so bad a voice to slander music any more than once.

You have to remember the police used to raid and arrest the audience for seeing Scorpio Rising (1964), or Jack Smith movies. Wouldn't that be exciting today, if you see went to the movie and everyone at the IFC was arrested in a paddy wagon and taken away?

Many novelists say, "I'm not a political novelist" - myself included. That's a standard, even a default position. Whereas that divide between art and politics simply isn't possible in many countries. In Hungary, you couldn't be a fiction writer and then, when asked about politics, put your hands up in the air and say "But I'm not a political novelist." If you're a Chinese novelist, a novelist in a country where censorship is such an issue, how do you claim that politics has nothing to do with your writing? It's in your writing, it's shaping your words.

Every artist's strictly illimitable country is himself. An artist who plays that country false has committed suicide; and even a good lawyer cannot kill the dead. But a human being who's true to himself - whoever himself may be - is immortal; and all the atomic bombs of all the antiartists in spacetime will never civilize immortality.

Being singer is different than being an actor, where you call up sources from your own experience that you can apply to whatever Shakespeare drama you're in. But an actor is pretending to be somebody, a singer isn't. And that's the difference. Singers today have to sing songs where there's very little emotion involved. That and the fact that they have to sing hit records from years gone by doesn't leave a lot of room for any kind of intelligent creativity.