Phoebe Robinson Quotes

I do think that part of literature's job is to comment on and participate in the social issues of the time.

Art has to be reflective of our society.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

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.

I think the good thing about Macklemore is that he is very precise about what he gets involved in. As you can tell, he's very passionate about what he puts his name on, because he talks about things people don't usually talk about, and his concepts are very, very passionate.

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.

That's the best way to feed the human mind. That's how Bob Marley did it. He never put it in your face. After you got the groove, you were just singing the hooks, because you thought it was cool.

Hip-hop is still cool at a party. But to me, hip-hop has never been strictly a party; it is also there to elevate consciousness.

Artists have long urged cultural introspection by creating work that forces awareness of our current political and economic landscape.

The best kind of art or writing holds up a mirror to society.

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

Almost all of my early art dealt with the fallout from middle-class taboos, the messy, the ambivalent emotions couples felt, the inherent racism, the sexual tensions and the unhappiness roiling below the surface of our prim suburban lives. Meanwhile I was a suburban bad boy - cynical, sarcastic, contemptuous of all authority.

I'm kind of a twisted social documentary photographer.

I think it's a very important function of art to challenge accepted reality, especially when that reality is created by powerful interest groups.

A really good stand-up comic is a poet; it's about the use of language. It can be really poetic. And I like politically conscious comedy.

It's always great to be involved in something that's not in an in-your-face fashion, but has a message that goes out guised as entertainment.

I think it's always good when you're able to, as an actor, allow your work to be some kind of a conduit for social discourse, and an examination of where we are, as a society.

The mission of the theatre, after all, is to change, to raise the consciousness of people to their human possibilities.

The canary bird in the coal mine theory of the arts: artists should be treasured as alarm systems.

As my poor father used to say In 1963, Once people start on all this Art Goodbye, moralitee! And what my father used to say Is good enough for me.

The recent past is full of diverse examples of writers - Mahfouz in Egypt, Pamuk in Turkey, and more interestingly, Pasternak in the Soviet Union - who have conducted their arguments with their societies and its political arrangements through their art in subtle, oblique ways. They didn't always have the license to make bold pronouncements about freedom, democracy, Islam, and liberalism, but they exerted another kind of moral authority through their work.

You always feel better when you sing. Music touches people's hearts. You know, it doesn't go through your mental capacity, it just moves you and it will let you cry. It's worth it doing a show and when you touch a crowd and move yourself at the same

I do ballads that say what every man wants to say and that every woman wants to hear, or I do songs about social issues.

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.