Sixto Rodriguez Quotes

Good satire comes from anger. It comes from a sense of injustice, that there are wrongs in the world that need to be fixed. And what better place to get that well of venom and outrage boiling than a newsroom, because you're on the front lines.

The fundamental error of Europe has been to confine the light of knowledge to the wealthy and great, while the humble and the depressed have been as sedulously excluded from its participation as the wretched criminal, immured in a dungeon, is from the light of Heaven.

The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must

I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel - it's vulgar.

All imperfections are forced upon the imperfect, so the 'perfect' can live content and oblivious.

Aristocracy is always cruel.

Privilege is the greatest enemy of right.

People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

I think that children are acutely sensitive to injustice because they live in a world that is absolutely filled with injustice. They have very, very little power, and they are extremely aware of power relations.

Twenty years on, the books are still fun to write and I've still got lots of stories I want to tell, mainly about social injustice and people chewed up by the system.

For me, any fiction of nobles and swords necessarily has to be a story of corruption, injustice and savagely violent conflict - because any other treatment is going to have all the heft and realistic honesty of a bedtime fairy tale for five year olds.

The common people have no history: persecuted by the present, they cannot think of preserving the memory of the past.

Slavery is the first step towards civilization. In order to develop it is necessary that things should be much better for some and much worse for others, then those who are better off can develop at the expense of others.

The breath of an aristocrat is the death rattle of freedom.

There is no justice in social justice, and there is no equality in social equality.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

'No Sweetness Here' is the kind of old-fashioned social realism I have always been drawn to in fiction, and it does what I think all good literature should: It entertains you.

This land is your land and this land is my land, sure, but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway.

Hip hop music is important precisely because it sheds light on contemporary politics, history, and race. At its best, hip hop gives voice to marginal black youth we are not used to hearing from on such topics.

And if you ask again whether there is any justice in the world, you'll have to be satisfied with the reply: Not for the time being; at any rate, not up to this Friday.

If we open our history books, we shall see that the laws, for all that they are or should be contracts amongst free men, have rarely been anything but the tools of the passions of a few men or the offspring of a fleeting and haphazard necessity.

On stage, I find anger at the unfairness of the world easily.

However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.

As there is oppression of the majority such oppression will be fought with increasing hatred.