Samuel R. Delany Quotes

We need to challenge the dominant culture: by ethics, principles and values.

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.

Art should offend people because art should challenge people.

As an artist you actually do have to make a choice to be an outsider. If you're an outsider you have the freedom to say what people on the inside don't dare to say.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Contemporary art will help me to modernise our society.

When you do have songs where you're going to say something, some kind of statement about cultural or social stuff, that in general people love it. People love to be challenged in that way.

The differences between revolution in art and revolution in politics are enormous. Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead.

In essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters.

Over the past few years, many of us have increasingly begun to question the direction and meaning of our society as it has developed over the past several centuries.

Due to the failure of politics, which has become a process of middle-management, art has become one of the last open spaces to question core beliefs and to design a viable future. Art becomes an open space where we can ask fundamental questions about ourselves.

It's art that pushes against psychological and social expectations, that tries to transform decay into something generative, that is replicative in a baroque way, that isn't about progress, and wants to - as Walt Whitman put it - 'contain multitudes.'

I am not saying that the Renaissance in any way was a feminist movement - hardly. But the arts flourished, and in more social settings as opposed to being confined to the church.

Right now, black female artists are the most interesting people to think about. People are ready to hear whatever we're gonna say, and I'm not scared to say anything.

I think artists throughout the history of time have always been controversial and have been a voice to speak to public culture in a way that a politician can't because they'll lose their constituency.

Our art, in a sense, is quite revolutionary.

When you really make things that really challenge the status quo or challenge issues, and you do it artistically, and you do it with no fear, people are listening.

Our country's social revolution lends itself to jokes and I use them.

My theory is that hip-hop is the most advanced version of civilisation on earth, and we are here to usher the rest of humanity into the Age of Aquarius.

Bohemia isn't somewhere an artist runs to escape society. It's a place where like-minded artists gather to plot the downfall of dogma and ignorance.

Art is nowhere near as dangerous as it should be.

Civilization may be said indeed to be the creation of its outlaws.

The time-honored role of the artist [is] to speak truth to power.

I think art is a very important weapon to achieve human freedom

In every society, the artists will be the ones who set themselves up as contrary to whatever the society expects.