Ryuichi Sakamoto Quotes

I've never done anything so political before. I've spent years shouting my mouth off about serious issues over dinner tables but never really had the confidence to express my views in a song.

Let's face it: There are people who are extremists in every corner of society, and whatever flag they're waving is something Bad Religion has stood against.

I want to use my music to deliver a political message and sometimes to denounce, but I don't want to be a politician.

We're not a political band, we're a socially-minded band.

But why shouldn't I speak out? Don't you speak out in this country?

I don't spend my hours worrying how to slip a social message into my act.

I'm not one to go down that road to say I have some kind of social consciousness.

Sometimes music isn't the way to talk politics, you know?

My topics are timely. When an event is happening is when I want to be there... I think it is our duty to challenge the status quo.

We accept the world in order to change it. If you do not accept, then what are you going to change?

I can't exactly say why there's not much protest music to speak off. And I know there are acts out there still putting a message in their music.

All graffiti is low-level dissent, but stencils have an extra history. They've been used to start revolutions and to stop wars.

I've never written a political song. Songs can't save the world. I've gone through all that.

Other than Green Day, we haven't had a lot of protest music over the past few decades.

Early in my career, people wanted to hear music about protest, about trying to change things.

I don't set out to write a political song. I am not one of those that feels compelled to write about what's going on.

I've always been interested in socially political, or overtly political, comedy.

We were a country band with a social conscience.

We didn't start out to make a protest record at all. That would have been too shallow. As usual, it was simply a case of absorbing what's going on around us.

Consumerism diverts us from thinking about women's rights, it stops us from thinking about Iraq, it stops us from thinking about what's going on in Africa - it stops us from thinking in general.

As much as I disagreed with every second of 'Fahrenheit 9/11,' the fact that it is out made me jump for joy.

One of the things that I've always not liked is the modern players have always concentrated on dancing in the end zone and BSing when serious things were going on in this country that needed to be changed. So my opinion is that when these young people stand up and risk their careers, that's a good sign for everything and all of us.

I was 100 percent political in the '80s - the first time around, let's call it, my first life as an artist.

There's a social piece to what's going on in the Sugarland world, but we've never been a band that's political, and I maintain that.

I sing about social issues, not the boy-girl stuff.