Billy Bragg Quotes

All good art should be political, I think, and inevitably it all becomes political really, in one way or another.

I don't believe that there is a separation between art and political consciousness.

Art is not something to decorate a wall. Art is a political weapon.

Some of the greatest artists did their best work when they got political.

I am an artist and a political being as well.

I'm not sure I am a politician. I would say that I am still an artist, and I'm trying to use politics as an instrument for change.

For me, writing, drawing, and political activism are three separate pursuits; each has its own intensity. I happen to be especially attuned to and engaged with the society in which I live. Both my writing and my drawing are invariably mixed up with politics, whether I want them to be or not.

Art and politics must move closer together. Reflection and action must be equally valid in good men if history is not to take one course and art another.

People like Dick Gregory, Paul Robeson, Harry Belafonte and Nina Simone show me what the definition of an artist is - it isn't just to make art but to speak truth to what's happening, speak beauty into the world, speak love into the world and also... get involved.

I am an artist with very strong social and political concerns.

If people are coming to 'Hamilton' to leave their politics behind, you came to the wrong show.

Everything I do is political.

The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.

It's sometimes hard to talk about politics and art. Obviously, I have my core beliefs, but I think art is best when it's troublesome and pushes against stuff.

Everything is art. Everything is politics.

I have a great deal of hope. I think that change is here, it's happening. But I know that if we think it's just going to happen on its own, that's not the way it works. We need people to keep talking about women of color writing comics and living the charge. Not just talking but doing. Making art, putting it out there.

I think being an activist and an artist is an interesting contradiction, because so often they are at odds with one another. When you write as an artist you have to clean the palate of your own politics in creating characters and activism is kind of the exact opposite.

Think of anybody - Dostoevsky or Jane Austen - [their work] was always something that now we would call political. So I don't see those separations too much, between what is artistic and what is political. Maybe in painting... no, I don't even believe that.

The interesting artists I know are the ones doing political work. The most interesting people I know are the people who care about politics.

I don't think there was really a time when I have not been politically aware.

I'm a sort of political person, and I feel that there's a kind of ineradicably political dimension to theater, to all theater, whether it's overtly political or not.

I am such a political person.

I don't intend to simply go away and write my plays and be a good boy. I intend to remain an independent and political intelligence in my own right.

A lot of artists say, I'm not political. People are afraid of this word.

Protest is patriotic. Since the beginning of musical time, American singers and songwriters have used their talent and bully pulpits to show us America's strengths and shortcomings.