Jane Fonda Quotes

In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty. Only under a dictatorship is literature expected to exhibit an harmonious design or an inspirational tone.

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

There is not a special imposition on writers to be activists. All that does is encourage writers to write propaganda. Propaganda can be written by anybody, including dictators.

I think it's important, if you are an artist, to use your music to stand up for what you believe in.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

An intellectual's weapon is writing, but sometimes people react as if it were a firearm. A writer can do a lot to change the situation, but as far as I know, no dictatorship has fallen because of a sonnet.

Even a polemic has some justification if one considers that my own first poetic experiments began during a dictatorship and mark the origin of the Hermetic movement.

I believe that the power of literature is stronger than the power of tyranny.

I do not wanna write a song like 'Coathanger' so Andrew Breitbart can rage against me on his web site. It's not my idea of fun.

I admire Ai Weiwei for his art and his activism. His art is beautiful in form, and in function embodies the principles of populism and social consciousness I aspire to in my own practice.

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.

Young kids who are out there who are upset and angry, they can watch this and realize that you can speak out through your pen and not just with rage and anger, and challenge the people who are telling you things that you don't like to hear, like 'Hamilton' did.

The 'Bohemian Manifesto' represents those that actually have to step out of society because they cannot join, but then they become the saviors of society because they create the actual possibilities of change.

You should live hoping you are going to offend people, because then you're doing something.

No dictatorship can be sustained within the context of an information revolution.

Every budding dictatorship begins by muzzling the artists, because they're a mouthy lot and they don't line up and salute very easily.

The artist in our time has two chief responsibilities: (1) art; and (2) sedition.

To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary.

The problem with literature, with writing, is that it works sometimes in terms of correction of social ills. Other times, it just does not suffice. The proof of that is the ability of a dictator to snuff out the life of a writer.

(There is) art that states the problems of society and wakes people up to make changes in their lives or in their communities,...art that offers an alternative, that demonstrates human behavior that can become a model for creativity, cooperation, freedom and playfulness, and...art that in itself provides glimpses of a larger consciousness or reflects upon the inexplicable.

When I need to take a side, I write a newspaper article and I tell my government, "You should not do that, you should do this." They don't listen to me, but I've been doing this for sixty years now. But, when I write a novel, I am not in that business.

Once you capitulate to one dictator, does that mean that the next dictator or the next terrorist that says you're not going to make a comedy about - or a film at all about ISIS. All of us in public life have a responsibility right now to speak out and to say, 'No, Sony, you did the wrong thing' and to say to Hollywood, come behind - the other studios should come behind Sony and offer their support.

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.

If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen.

I'm not very good at sounding like other people. When you're going through your 20's and trying to get a break and that kind of thing, and you're trying to do something that sounds like film music, your idea of what it would be, it never really worked out for me and it's only really when I learned to trust the fact that I could only really sound like me.