Political Art Quotes

My argument would be that I don't think there is much that's genuinely political art that is good art. ~ Thom Yorke

All art is political in the sense that it serves someone's politics. ~ August Wilson

Political art - not always a contradiction in terms - can destroy institutions, or eat away at them. ~ Joe Haldeman

I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain ending - an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check, and nihilism at bay. ~ William Kentridge

In my own work I am invested in art as a way to break through impasses, whether those impasses are personal, social, or political. ~ Jill Soloway

I don't understand how any good art could fail to be political. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Perhaps many white North Americans fear an overtly political art because it might persuade us emotionally of what we think we are "rationally" against; it might get us on a level we have lost touch with; undermine the safety we have built for oneselves, remind us of what is better left forgotten. ~ Adrienne Rich

The arts can bring the heart to the aid of the head, the personal to the political. ~ Scilla Elworthy

Old men declare war because they have failed to solve complex political and economic problems. ~ Art Hoppe

Political art expresses the cliches you agree with, unlike propaganda, which expresses the cliches you don't. ~ Brad Holland

It is difficult to make political art work. ~ Thom Yorke

It seems obvious, looking back, that the artists of Weimar Germany and Leninist Russia lived in a much more attenuated landscape of media than ours, and their reward was that they could still believe, in good faith and without bombast, that art could morally influence the world. Today, the idea has largely been dismissed, as it must in a mass media society where art's principal social role is to be investment capital, or, in the simplest way, bullion. We still have political art, but we have no effective political art. An artist must be famous to be heard, but as he acquires fame, so his work accumulates 'value' and becomes, ipso-facto, harmless. As far as today's politics is concerned, most art aspires to the condition of Muzak. It provides the background hum for power. ~ Robert Hughes

I don't really believe in political art. I feel in my heart the purpose of art transcends cultural and class and politics. I think something like the Sistine Chapel is something that goes beyond just being a Christian thing. It transcends its Christianity and becomes sort of a universal beauty. And I think that's true of music and art and literature. ~ Sean Lennon

Man, says Protagoras, now has the wisdom necessary for life ... but he does not have political wisdom. At this point, people are living spread out and hence are at the mercy of stronger animals, who begin killing them off ... They seek to save themselves from the beasts by banding together and forming cities. But they do injustice to one another, at such close quarters, because they lack the political art. So, dispersed once more, they begin perishing again. ~ Paul-Ludwig Landsberg

Most of the great practitioners of the art of acting know exactly what they're doing; even in the best, most successful moments, when they let go of the awareness of what they are doing, they still, somewhere deep inside their body, know what they're doing. There is a craft. ~ Meryl Streep

The flow. Yeah. Knowing you could step on the court and make it happen. You practiced, sure. But then, when you walked out there, you could just go. You could flow, that was it: you created and you didn't totally know how. You just knew you could, so you did. It wasn't thinking and it wasn't imitating somebody else's moves, though you always looked carefully when you watched good players play. But when you played ... it was something you couldn't explain. Neal used to know. It didn't come from thinking about it. ~ Doug Wilhelm

In themselves, experiments are not art. Infinite amounts of energy are wasted because everybody feels he has to make his own start, his own beginning, instead of getting to know what has already been done. It is doubtful that anyone who doesn't want to ... ~ Jan Tschichold

It's wrong to focus only on economic cooperation and then to hope that a sufficiently stable system will become democratic more or less by itself. The EU needs to urge its neighbors to pursue both economic stability and political modernization in equal measures. ~ Alvaro De Vasconcelos

We can't accommodate terrorism. When someone uses the slaughter of innocent people to advance a so-called political cause, at that point the political cause becomes immoral and unjust and they should be eliminated from any serious discussion, any serious debate. ~ Rudy Giuliani

I believe we need wilderness in order to be more complete human beings, to not be fearful of the animals that we are, an animal who bows to the incomparable power of natural forces when standing on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, an animal who understands a sense of humility when watching a grizzly overturn a stump with its front paw to forage for grubs in the lodgepole pines of the northern Rockies, an animal who weeps over the sheer beauty of migrating cranes above the Bosque del Apache in November, an animal who is not afraid to cry with delight in the middle of a midnight swim in a phospherescent tide, an animal who has not forgotten what it means to pray before the unfurled blossom of the sacred datura, remembering the source of all true visions.

As we step over the threshold of the twenty-first century, let us acknowledge that the preservation of wilderness is not so much a political process as a spiritual one, that the language of law and science used so successfully to define and defend what wilderness has been in the past century must now be fully joined with the language of the heart to illuminate what these lands mean to the future. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

I'm always right, always wrong. Dressing bad's like loving you there is nothing i haven't worn. Nothing, I haven't said before. You are nothing I haven't felt before. ~ Tegan Quin

I went to college to play football, not to study it. ~ Art Donovan

Nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and the needs of man are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor weak nature. The most useful place in a house is the lavatory. ~ Theophile Gautier

If I say I am not a politician, it is because I did not go to school to do political science. But at the end of the day, I think we are all born politicians. It's practical. All you gotta do is practice. ~ George Weah

Now and then some one says that the religion of his father and mother is good enough for him, and wonders why anybody should desire a better. Surely we are not bound to follow our parents in religion any more than in politics, science or art. ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

I'd say, if you want to be an artist, start with your art; start with making great music and it will, hopefully, eventually cut through all of the nonsense that is out there. ~ Queen Latifah

Rain is nature's art; umbrella is man's art. When you walk with your umbrella in a rainy day, you walk with a super art which is a combination of two different arts! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

The law has been perverted, and the powers of the state have become perverted along with it. The law has not only been turned from its proper function, but made to follow an entirely contrary purpose. The law has become a tool for every kind of greed. Instead of preventing crime, the law itself is guilty of the abuses it is supposed to punish. If this is true, it is a serious matter, and moral duty requires me to call the attention of my fellow-citizens to it. ~ Frederic Bastiat

As I very much liked to draw and paint as a child, I entered a special art program in high school, which was very much like being in an art school imbedded in a regular high school curriculum. ~ Jerome Isaac Friedman

I wasn't always a demon.
My name is Maggie Frew, and I grew up a simple human girl in suburban Iowa. I don't carry a pitchfork, or have a forked tail. I'm not a creature from Hell. I'm a political campaign manager. Though, I guess some people might argue those are the same thing. ~ Patricia Murphy

Homelessness is not a race thing. It's not a gender thing. It's not a religious thing. It's not a gay or straight thing. It's not a political thing. It's not a thing, it's people. ~ Nellie Cake

But outside of the North of Ireland there is no religious question, and in the North it is fundamentally more political than religious. ~ James Stephens

One certainly does work badly in spring: and why? Because one's feelings are being stimulated. And only amateurs think that a creative artist can afford to have feelings. It's a naïve amateur illusion; any genuine honest artist will smile at it. Sadly, perhaps, but he will smile. Because, of course, what one says must never be one's main concern. It must merely be the raw material, quite indifferent in itself, out of which the work of art is made; and the act of making must be a game, aloof and detached, performed in tranquillity. If you attach too much importance to what you have to say, if it means too much to you emotionally, then you may be certain that your work will be a complete fiasco. You will become solemn, you will become sentimental, you will produce something clumsy, ponderous, pompous, ungainly, unironical, insipid, dreary and commonplace; it will be of no interest to anyone, and you yourself will end up disillusioned and miserable… For that is how it is, Lisaveta: emotion, warm, heartfelt emotion, is invariably commonplace and unserviceable - only the stimulation of our corrupted nervous system, its cold ecstasies and acrobatics, can bring forth art. One simply has to be something inhuman, something standing outside humanity, strangely remote and detached from its concerns, if one is to have the ability or indeed even the desire to play this game with it, to play with men's lives, to portray them effectively and tastefully. Our stylistic and formal talent, our ~ Thomas Mann

No man is fit to be a Senator ... unless he is willing to surrender his political life for great principle. ~ Henry F. Ashurst

I wanted to tell you that art is the most harmless activity of mankind. But I suddenly recalled that art was often used for propaganda purposes by totalitarian systems. I wanted to tell you about the extraordinary sensitivity of an artist, but I recalled that Hitler was a painter and Stalin used to write sonnets...
"Each scientific discovery opens doors behind which we are confronted with new closed doors. Art does not solve problems but makes us aware of their existence... ~ Magdalena Abakanowicz

Art is for everybody. ~ Keith Haring

There is no royal road to learning; no short cut to the acquirement of any art. ~ Anthony Trollope

God makes something special and unique about each person that sets them apart from every other person, and to me that's is what artistry is about, whether you are a plumber, a pinter, a musician whatever it is that is unique about you that is translated into your art. ~ Bubba Sparxxx

If you can't afford the good food or if you can't afford health care or if you don't have a job or if your car is dangerous because you can't get it fixed and you DIE, you just lost the game-bzzzzz-thanks for playing extreme capitalism. ~ Marc Maron

All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are up to a point. ~ George Will

In addition to the decline in competition, American politics today is characterized by a growing ideological polarization between the two major political parties. ~ Thomas E. Mann

Food is art, I believe. If you are going to be serving a living thing, you have to honor that living thing with some kind of care and thought and preparation to rationalize the taking of that life in some way. ~ Bryan Fuller

For his heart was in his work, and the heart giveth grace unto every art. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

to Vaneigem and the Situationists who by shrewd use of collage and juxtaposition exposed both the poverty and richness of slogans, and the thinly veiled hypocrisy of a "spectacular" society which by not respecting words abuses people, and by insulting the intelligence creates a state of political cretinisation in which the many and various forms of authoritarian control dominate. ~ Alexis Lykiard

When a culture is being dumbed down as effectively as ours is, its narrative arts (literature, film, theatre) seem to vacillate between the brutal and the bland, sometimes in the same work. ~ Tom Robbins

[Walt] Whitman and [humanist educator John] Dewey tried to substitute hope for knowledge. They wanted to put shared utopian dreams - dreams of an ideally decent and civilized society - in the place of knowledge of God's Will, Moral Law, the Laws of History, or the Facts of Science ... As long as we have a functioning political left, we still have a chance to achieve our country, to make it the country of Whitman's and Dewey's dreams. ~ Richard Rorty

Winckelmann wished to live with a work of art as a friend. The saying is true of pen and pencil. Fresh lustre shoots from Lycidas in a twentieth perusal. The portraits of Clarendon are mellowed by every year of reflection. ~ Robert Aris Willmott

First I have a think, and then I put a line around it. ~ Roger Fry

Works of art are infinitely solitary and nothing is less likely to reach them than criticism. Only love can grasp them and hold them and do them justice. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Art is for anyone. It just isn't for everyone. Still, over the past decade, its audience has hugely grown, and that's irked those outside the art world, who get irritated at things like incomprehensibility or money. ~ Jerry Saltz

The past is not the present: pretending it is corrupts art and thus both rots the mind and shrivels the imagination and conscience. ~ Paul Fussell

Doubtful it stood, as two spent swimmers that do cling together and choke their art. ~ William Shakespeare

FRIAR LAURENCE: Hold thy desperate hand:
Art thou a man? thy form cries out thou art:
Thy tears are womanish; thy wild acts denote
The unreasonable fury of a beast:
Unseemly woman in a seeming man!
Or ill-beseeming beast in seeming both!
Thou hast amazed me: by my holy order,
I thought thy disposition better temper'd.
Hast thou slain Tybalt? wilt thou slay thyself?
And stay thy lady too that lives in thee,
By doing damned hate upon thyself?
Why rail'st thou on thy birth, the heaven, and earth?
Since birth, and heaven, and earth, all three do meet
In thee at once; which thou at once wouldst lose.
Fie, fie, thou shamest thy shape, thy love, thy wit;
Which, like a usurer, abound'st in all,
And usest none in that true use indeed
Which should bedeck thy shape, thy love, thy wit:
Thy noble shape is but a form of wax,
Digressing from the valour of a man;
Thy dear love sworn but hollow perjury,
Killing that love which thou hast vow'd to cherish;
Thy wit, that ornament to shape and love,
Misshapen in the conduct of them both,
Like powder in a skitless soldier's flask,
Is set afire by thine own ignorance,
And thou dismember'd with thine own defence.
What, rouse thee, man! thy Juliet is alive,
For whose dear sake thou wast but lately dead;
There art thou happy: Tybalt would kill thee,
But thou slew'st Tybalt; there are thou happy too:
William Shakespeare

In the end, no amount of American forces can solve the political differences that lie at the heart of somebody else's civil war. ~ Barack Obama

I'm very proud that our country still produces people like my son, who choose the path less traveled; that knowingly step up to serve, even though our country is tearing itself apart with things like political machinations. ~ Steve Daines