Johnny Van Zant Quotes

I think it speaks to people in 2015, right now. We address real situations. It's real life! Everything that happens in 'Dope' could happen today.

There's a tradition in American fiction that is deadly serious and earnest - like the Steinbeckian social novel.

I've had several working-man songs that I like.

I come from a working-class family. They're the people I know and the people I love, I guess. I do not write about them for political reasons, but because, as I see it, most interesting things - social, political, emotional - take place there. It's a bottomless well for an author like me.

Once the working classes were in chains, now they're in chain restaurants.

I am not given to Political Economy, but I can use my eyes. I have never seen the masters (mill owners) getting thin and haggard for want of food

You're beginning to hear the tale of the common man and woman rather than the traditional memoir about the generals who just finished the war or the politicians who just rendered glorious service to the country.

Physical labor, manual labor - if you can stay close to those folks, there's always plenty to write about, 'cause their issues are real issues.

It's an artist's duty to reflect the times in which we live.

I am a social realist writer.

I just wanted to write about stuff that was happening in real life, and that's not just love songs about your girlfriend.

Social realism takes research.

In the first test screening of 'RoboCop,' it tested very high. Then they asked the people why they liked it, and the first answer was, 'I liked it because it was political.' And the second answer was because, 'It feels like it deals with current affairs.' And the third answer was, 'Because it feels emotional.'

These interests of the workers, as the exploited and oppressed, class of society, are the same in all countries.

When I first stepped into literature twenty-five years ago, I wanted to work on behalf of the oppressed, the working masses, and it seemed to me, mistakenly, that I would not find them among the Jews.

I don't tend to write straight dramas where real life just impinges. But because I don't, when I do, it is very interesting to slap people in the face with just an absolute of life.

Bourgeois humor is always bankrupt; it is mortgaged to Red radicalism.

Capitalists personally are often the mildest-mannered men that ever shattered a family or drained a workingman of his marrow.

The workingmen have been exploited all the way up and down the line by employers, landlords, everybody.

The whole contention lies between those that labor for a living and those that do not.

The bloody capitalists cannot conclude an honorable peace. They can conclude only a dishonorable peace, based upon a division of spoils.

... wholly in the interest of the creditor classes, the banking fraternity, and the commercial world, without proper provision for the debtor classes and those who toil, produce and sustain the country.

To the working class there is no foreigner but the capitalist.

Workers cannot buy with their salaries what they have produced and at the same time copiously nourish the swarm of idlers who live upon their work.

The real question at issue is the improvement of the social and moral condition of the masses of the population; we wish to elevate in the gradation of society that great class which gains its support by manual labour. The mere interests of the landlords and occupying tenants, important as they are, are subordinate …