Richard Ashcroft Quotes

The country has become much more conservative, partly because it's been taken over by the religious right.

I prefer to make common cause with those whose weapons are guitars, banjos, fiddles and words.

I think that liberals need to grow up.

The hardest song to write is a protest song, a topical song with meaning.

The best thing I can think of would be to create a union between something as beautiful and powerful and wonderful as Hollywood films and a criticism of the status quo. That's my dream, to make such a German film.

The American people will always be progressive as well as conservative.

I don't like bigotry and intolerance, but they do exist and I don't think you're going to get them out by passing laws.

I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty.

I really am not interested in making political music per se. I'm making personal records, but at the same time, I'm very much aware of my surroundings. And those surroundings, what's going on in the larger picture, affects my everyday life and affects the way that I think.

Eternal vigilance must be maintained to guard against those who seek to stifle ideas, establish a narrow orthodoxy, and divide our nation along arbitrary lines of race, ethnicity, and religious belief or non-belief.

If you are creative, you must be dissident.

Artists have to show us what is not going well within the person and within the society, not try to cover it up.

By the late 70s conservatism was becoming more corporate on the one hand, more theocratic on the other. In reaction to the 60s, conservatism was more about order than freedom, more about conformity than singularity.

This is the age of the new tolerance and it is producing a bumper crop of anti-Christian and anti-American sentiment.

My job as an artist, as I see it, is to understand and in some cases to take on various ways of thinking about people and the world that are different from my own, sometimes radically different.

I think any film that asks its audience a degree of tolerance and acceptance of those less fortunate than themselves isn't a bad thing from whatever culture you're in or from whatever part of any political spectrum.

Drawing the kind of comics that I do takes so long that to specifically address something as transitory as a political matter in it would be about as effective as composing a symphony with hopes that it would depose a despot. On top of that, I personally don't think that my version of art is the best way to deal with political issues at all, or, more specifically, the place to make a point. Not that art can't, but it's the rare art that still creates something lasting if its main aim was purely to change a particular unfair social structure.

The arts have long been an integral and vibrant part of our nation's cultural heritage. In its many forms, art enables us to gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and of our society. Providing us with a unique way to learn about people of other cultures, it allows us to discover all that we have in common. At its best, art can beautify our cities, encourage economic development and social change, and profoundly affect the ways we live our lives.

Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which otherwise would remain unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists.

ART is domination. It's making people think that for that precise moment in time there is only one way, one voice. Yours.

I just said let's get some poets on tv. And when they said that sounded unlikely, I made it worse. I said, no man, I want to put a bunch of black poets on stage, too. Some Latino poets who barely speak English and Asian poets who can't believe how discriminated against they are. It was luck nad being in the right place. I wasn't saying nothing somebody else wasn't saying but they wouldn't hear it from them.

I consider myself a lyricist first and foremost, but if you get something else out of what I do, that's fine too. I'm not sitting back here telling people how they have to take my stuff. We just want to play music, and hope that people like it.

The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change.

I think it's really hard to make songs that pursue an agenda. You can kind of do it a little bit through a character, so the character gives voice to something or their story, the story of the character tells you something, but, for me anyway, it's really hard to write directly about politics.

The Mayans were right, as it turns out, when they predicted the world would end in 2012. It was just a select world: the G.O.P. universe of arrogant, uptight, entitled, bossy, retrogressive white guys. [...] Instead of smallpox, plagues, drought and Conquistadors, the Republican decline will be traced to a stubborn refusal to adapt to a world where poor people and sick people and black people and brown people and female people and gay people count.