Nick Cave Quotes

I support the idea that artists have to make a stand. I'm with that - you're putting the discussion on the table and you're letting people know. You're being brave as an artist and responsible to the community.

I believe art has to take responsibility but it should not give up being art.

The artist as citizen is here to stay.

Art exists for the human species. I think that all of the people who love art, those who teach art, and all of you should burn with the obligation to save the world.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

If you have the opportunity for your art to meet activism, you shouldn't pass that up when it comes your way.

At this point, in 2008, if you put out a book, a movie, or write a verse, paint a painting, it should have some sort of social value.

Theater should address the stories of its communities, or I don't know why it's here.

A song's lyrics can't be held culprit for the overall change in society.

As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.

We need that expression. Whether we want to call it protest or not, we need to express and echo the echoes of the people. Artists need to do that.

It is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself.

Art and activism can be symbiotic. They don't have to be, of course; they can also be contradictory.

An artist must be a reactionary

If artists cannot speak up for human dignity or rights, then who else will do it?

As artists and professionals, it is our obligation to enact our own internal revolution, a private insurrection inside our own skulls. In this uprising we free ourselves from the tyranny of consumer culture.

As an artist, I have to be the ambassador of everything.

I think that we have a unique opportunity as performers and artists to be kind of the town criers and also to get more people to listen, so that's a blessing and a responsibility that I take very seriously.

Paul Robeson once said that the artist has the responsibility to either help liberate the community or further oppress it. And I think that when Eldridge Cleaver wrote it down it was interpreted as his, but there's a history of people saying things of that nature and meaning it. And what I do is in that tradition, in that mode.

Our jobs as artists is to make sure our art tells a real story and let people see themselves in these characters. It's about having a conversation about being better people.

All art is propaganda. ... The only difference is the kind of propaganda. Since art is essential for human life, it can't just belong to the few. Art is the universal language, and it belongs to all mankind. All painters have been propagandists or else they have not been painters. ... Every artist who has been worth anything in art has been such a propagandist. ... Every strong artist has been a propagandist. I want to be a propagandist and I want to be nothing else. ... I want to use my art as a weapon.

I serve society by rocking!

As a street artist, I'm used to sharing my stuff with the public. It's a communal experience. I've learned not to be so precious, but rather to enjoy the process.

And every good artist knows that the gift comes from somewhere else, and it's there for a reason, and that's to make the world a better place.

If there’s a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn’t exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn’t have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that’s it. That’s all an artist does.