Krzysztof Penderecki Quotes

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

All the great political music was made at the height of political confrontations.

I think that art is still a site for resistance and for the telling of various stories, for validating certain subjectivities we normally overlook. I'm trying to be affective, to suggest changes, and to resist what I feel are the tyrannies of social life on a certain level.

I set out to create a means whereby music could be a way of vindicating the rights of the masses.

The Man of Galilee, the Carpenter, the workingman who became the revolutionary agitator of his day soon found himself to be an undesirable citizen in the eyes of the ruling knaves and they had him crucified.

Peoples do not defy repression and death, nor do they remain for nights on end protesting energetically, just because of merely formal matters.

History shows us that in times of people feeling like they are in need of some sort of rebellion or protests, the artists rise because the poetry we create about pain and its relationship to culture in the world begins to soothe and heal people who are feeling confused or afraid.

Radical feminism is still threatening.

The black artist's role in America is to aid in the destruction of America as he knows it.

Civil rights activists and union activists shared not just common values and objectives but also common enemies.

I think that there are artists of different genres whose calling is to use their art to hope to affect and better the human condition - whether it's System of a Down, or Rage Against the Machine, or Public Enemy, or the Clash, Bruce Springsteen, or Pete Seeger. It's a group that I'm proud to be counted among.

We might not be back. I might be in jail. I might be anywhere. But when I leave, you'll remember I said, with the last words on my lips, that I am a revolutionary. And you're going to have to keep on saying that. You're going to have to say that I am a proletariat; I am the people.

As a tactic, violence is absurd. No one can compete with the Government in violence, and the resort to violence, which will surely fail, will simply frighten and alienate some who can be reached, and will further encourage the ideologists and administrators of forceful repression.

If the State cannot survive the anti-slavery agitation, then let the State perish. If the Church must be cast down by the strugglings of Humanity to be free, then let the Church fall and its fragments be scattered to the four winds of Heaven, never more to curse the earth.

I personally don't have anything to say to Mike Pence. I'm very lucky because legislation that he's pushed hasn't affected my life at all. I spoke out because there are people out there whose lives have been affected by change that he's tried to make.

I've carried witty banners against laws that would curtail my freedoms.

The personal is political for so many.

It's not in the mainstream media, but across towns, it is amazing how there are small groups of people getting together and forming artistic collectives - they may not be being overtly political, but I'd say by channelling their energy into community projects, that's a valid political statement.

I just look at music as a retreat from organizing. It's like a tug-of-war with me. Music can be effective, but it's not any good if there isn't a grass-roots movement going on to support it.

Gandhi protested against restrictive policies. So did 'Guru.'

Everything I do is political.

What I never seem to understand about feminist-bashing conservative women is their inability to see how ironic it is that they attend political rallies, share their opinions, and cast their ballots when the America they're nostalgic about wouldn't allow them to do any of those things.

At the same time women are putting on the headscarf, they are also going to work, to education, increasingly vocal in the media - and this is the confusing thing about Muslim women in the West,. They are becoming Westernized at the same time as they are adopting their religious identity more strongly.

Music must awaken people to do their duty as citizens and act.

My sense of politics and justice was deeply shaped in adolescence by my involvement with the underground punk - rock scene, and though lots of social and political issues had come forth in my comics, it wasn't until my late 20s that I felt properly equipped to address certain issues of race, power, and violence in my work.