Tom Morello Quotes:

Paul Ryan's love for Rage Against The Machine is amusing, because he is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades

Topics: Two, Machines, Embodiment, Rockers, Rage Against The Machine

In our country there's never been a successful progressive struggle that did not have a soundtrack, whether it was the civil rights movement, workers' rights movement, women's rights movement. There's got to be songs at the barricades, and those are the kinds of songs that I try to write.

Topics: Country, Song, Struggle, Workers Rights

Music, I think, is best when it honestly explores personal demons, and it stirs around in the silt of the psyche to find out what's really there.

source: - "Tom Morello on solo album, politics and racism". Interview with Denise Quan, www.cnn.com. September 29, 2011.

Topics: Thinking, Demon, Personal Demons

My music is made for the people who are willing to stand up to change this world themselves.

source: - Source: www.pbs.org

Topics: People, World, Made

There's a lot of injustice in the world and it's what I sing about in my music and what I try to confront in my life as an activist.

source: - Source: www.pbs.org

Topics: Trying, World, Injustice, Injustice In The World

A musicians or artists responsibility is a simple one, and that is, through your music to tell the truth.

Topics: Responsibility, Simple, Artist

I have another name for what they're terming whistleblowers, and that's righteous heroes. From Bradley Manning to Snowden. They're people of conscience who are unwilling to turn a blind eye to the crimes of our government. And thank goodness for them.

Topics: Hero, Eye, Government, Whistleblowers, Blind Eyes

If aliens came down and challenged us to a Battle of the Bands to decide the fate of Planet Earth, I would feel very confident putting early Van Halen forward as our champion.

Topics: Fate, Champion, Battle, Van Halen

I think that new artistic challenges help you grow both as a person, as an artist, and then they feed back into your other work, and tend to magnify it.

Topics: Thinking, Artist, Challenges

Whenever I set out in a new direction, whether it's with a new band or being a frontman or writing a comic book or entering into movie scoring or anything like that, I wouldn't say that I do it fearlessly.

Topics: Book, Writing, Band

The way corporate media likes to portray America is as a homogenous whole that high-five's each other at the Super Bowl. But what we have is a grotesque disparity between the rich and poor that is only getting wider.

Topics: Media, America, Way, Disparity

I feel fortunate to have made records during an era where people actually bought music. But I have friends in struggling up-and-coming bands that will certainly never be able to pay the rent, because music has been devalued.

Topics: Struggle, People, Band

I was a fan of heavy music - first metal, then punk, then hip hop.

Topics: Hip Hop, Firsts, Hips, Metal Music, Heavy Metal Music

I find it ironic that now water is more expensive than music. On the one hand, record companies can't go crying when they've gouged consumers for decades, charging exorbitant prices for CDs that cost 29 cents to make. On the other hand, when music is free, musicians starve.

Topics: Hands, Cds, Water, Record Companies

The real estate agent had to go door-to-door in the apartment building we wanted to rent, asking if it was OK for this interracial family - my mom is white and I was a 1-year-old half-African kid - to live in the apartment building.

Topics: Mom, Real, Kids, Estate Agents

When real substantive change happens it's the people who watch your show, they're the ones that make it happen. It's people whose names are not highlighted in history books. They're the ones that stand up in their place and time to make change.

Topics: Real, Book, Names, Place And Time

When you wanna rock hard, children, lean on F#.

Topics: Children, Rocks

I myself am a very, very peaceful person. Throughout our history, from our own American revolution to the resistance against apartheid in South Africa, to labor strikes in the US, people have resorted to violence to achieve a more progressive society, from time to time.

Topics: People, Peaceful, Resistance, Progressive Society

I think it's crucially important to be present in the lives of your children. They are my most important cause that I fight for. But I also feel an added responsibility that I want to leave them a better world than this one that we have now.

Topics: Children, Responsibility, Fighting

I don't want to leave this mess around my children to clean up. I want to swing absolutely as hard as I can to straighten things out before they get to the age where it starts hurting them.

source: - Source: www.pbs.org

Topics: Hurt, Children, Swings

Bashing the elite is what I'm all about in my music because they absolutely don't deserve the privileged position that they're in, and we're seeing this around the globe right now.

Topics: Music Is, Globes, Position

I'd say that one area where my political views have remained unchanged is that, I am opposed to the government spying on everybody.

Topics: Views, Government, Political, Political View, Government Spying

If you want to change the world right now, it's not so much a secret how you do it. You put the secrets of a criminal government on the Internet.

Topics: Government, Secret, World

There are literally billions of people on the planet who live in an unimaginable poverty that's not in any way different from the plight of the people in Orchid. And you can't have the splendor of Rodeo Drive without the sweatshops of Indonesia; those two things go hand in hand.

Topics: Hands, Orchids, Two, Rodeo, Rodeo Drive

What is poverty, if not violence. Like, the number of people who die every year from starvation and from hunger and poverty is in the tens of millions.

Topics: Numbers, Years, People, Hunger And Poverty

Poverty is curable, but it's just not done, because it's not profitable. And that is the kind of violence that's perpetuated on humanity.

Topics: Humanity, Poverty, Violence

I think you might be considered a terrorist for asking the question! It can be so broadly defined now. And the thing is, you're not privy to those decisions. Anyone who expresses any opinion can be considered a terrorist.

Topics: Thinking, Decision, Might

What draws people to the instrument is the love for guitar players that play a certain way. I mean, even though it wasn't intentional, it was hard to avoid copying Eddie Van Halen. He was basically the *bleep* back then.

Topics: Mean, Player, Guitar

Always question the authority.

Topics: Authority

The skin you're in makes choices for you.

source: - "Song: Maximum Firepower (One Man Revolution)". April 24, 2007.

Topics: Choices, Skins

Sacrifice and neon lights slave ships don't wait. Love many, trust few, and don't be late

Topics: Sacrifice, Light, Waiting

I didn't grow up with my Kenyan family. I grew up in a small, conservative suburb of Chicago.

Topics: Growing Up, Chicago, Conservative

The most powerful music is music with purpose.

Topics: Powerful, Purpose, Most Powerful, Powerful Music

Being a musician is a given for me-I didn't have much choice in the matter.

Topics: Choices, Matter, Musician

In a world of bands called Limp Bizkit and Hoobastank, Electric Sheep rolls off the tongue like a Shakespearean love sonnet. Leave me alone.

Topics: Sheep, Leave Me Alone, Band, Limp Bizkit

Music and the arts feed our souls, but a decent wage puts food on the table. Musicians, fans of music, and grassroots political organizations are a potent force to fight for social justice.

Topics: Art, Fighting, Organization, Grassroots

Then about 12 years ago it dawned on me that folk music - the music of Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs, early Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Pete Seeger - could be as heavy as anything that comes through a Marshall stack. The combination of three chords and the right lyrical couplet can be as heavy as anything in the Metallica catalogue.

Topics: Years, Cash, Bob, Couplets

I've always been on a personal mission to save the guitar.

Topics: Guitar, Missions, Personal Mission

In my own way, I was a rebellious kid.

Topics: Kids, Way, Rebellious

Things like rebellion and resistance to authority are absolutely as much a part of the human experience as love and cars are, and it's a part that doesn't get covered very much in pop music.

Topics: Car, Resistance, Rebellion

A good song should make you wanna tap your foot and get with your girl. A great song should destroy cops and set fire to the suburbs. I'm only interested in writing great songs.

Topics: Girl, Song, Writing, Rage Against The Machine

Of course, music is an art form, and it's not all that competitive. But we don't ever intend to be the second-best band on a stage at any show.

Topics: Art, Band, Second Best

I literally integrated the small town of Libertyville, Illinois. I was the first person of color to reside within its borders.

Topics: Color, Illinois, Firsts

I came late to the genre of folk music.

Topics: Genre, Folks, Folk Music

For the millennium [New Year's Eve], you really have a choice to make. You either have to be naked with your head on fire and a shotgun in Bali or else you have to spend time with friends or family around the fireplace. And I'm choosing option B

Topics: New Year, Years, Fire, Fireplaces, Bali

Tonight, it's the rock and roll all night and party every day hall of fame

Topics: Party, Night, Rock And Roll, Hall Of Fame

My parents met in Kenya. My father is African, is Kenyan. The Kenyan side of my family was involved in the anti-colonial movement.

Topics: Father, Parent, Movement

Well, I don't care for Paul Ryan's sound or his lyrics. He can like whatever bands he wants, but his guiding vision of shifting revenue more radically to the one percent is antithetical to the message of Rage.

Topics: Vision, Care, Want

You can kiss my Kiss-loving ***** because Kiss was never a critic's band. It was a people's band.

Topics: Kissing, People, Band

Amazingly talented singer who sang like an angry angel

Topics: Angel, Singers, Angry

America touts itself as the land of the free, but the number one freedom that you and I have is the freedom to enter into a subservient role in the workplace. Once you exercise this freedom you’ve lost all control over what you do, what is produced, and how it is produced. And in the end, the product doesn’t belong to you. The only way you can avoid bosses and jobs is if you don’t care about making a living. Which leads to the second freedom: the freedom to starve.

source: - "Modern Happiness: Springsteen and the American Dream" by Craig Werner, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 24, 2012.

Topics: Jobs, Exercise, Land, Making A Living, Land Of The Free

Bad presidents make for great music, and I'm gonna do my best to provide it.

Topics: President, Great Music

This unprecedented racism, bigotry and proto-fascist agenda that Donald Trump is trying to shove down America's throat has unleashed the resistance that will dethrone him.

source: - Source: www.billboard.com

Topics: America, Racism, Trying, Unleashed, Unprecedented

Sacrifice and neon lights, Slaveships don't wait, Love many, trust few, And don't be late...

source: - "Song: One Man Revolution". April 24, 2007.

Topics: Sacrifice, Light, Slave Ships, Neon Lights

Charles Manson loved the Beatles but didn’t understand them. Governor Chris Christie loves Bruce Springsteen but doesn’t understand him. And Paul Ryan is clueless about his favorite band, Rage Against the Machine.

source: - "Tom Morello: 'Paul Ryan Is the Embodiment of the Machine Our Music Rages Against'" by Tom Morello, www.rollingstone.com. August 16, 2012.

Topics: Clueless, Band, Machines, Manson, Rage Against The Machine

In America, we have freedom of choice. But some are free to choose between Lamborghini and Rolls Royce while others are free to choose which dumpster they're going to have their meal out of next. Some are free to choose which, you know, homes and farms to foreclosed on, while others choose which bridge they're going to sleep under tonight.

source: - Source: www.truth-out.org

Topics: Sleep, Home, Choices

I don't believe that the Democratic party has anything to do with the Left. We have two political parties in the US: a right wing party and a right centrist party. That's the Democrats. I laugh when people describe Barack Obama as a socialist president. As a socialist musician, I'll tell you when we have a socialist president. We don't have one now, not even close.

source: - Source: www.truth-out.org

Topics: Party, Believe, Laughing

My take is that there's two ways to approach history. You sit in your armchair and you watch it on the news and you return to your PlayStation. Or you get out in the streets and you make it. Like, when those Supreme Court justices, you know, legalize desegregation, it wasn't due to their infinite wisdom. It's because people whose names you do not read about in history books, people whose faces you will never see, were the ones who struggled and sacrificed, sometimes gave their lives, to make this country a more equal one. When, it's like those people don't make history, it's us.

source: - "Tom Morello Leads The Occupy 'Guitarmy'". Interview with Diane Sweet, crooksandliars.com. May 22, 2012.

Topics: Country, Book, People, Supreme Court Justice

The problem is not cop killers...it's killer cops.

Topics: Killers, Problem, Cop

I think I was meant to be a musician who speaks his mind about social justice issues. And I grew up in a lower middle class family, but a family that had enough money to buy a $50 guitar and a $50 amplifier, and had a basement to rehearse in. What I think the global human cost of this horrific poverty is how many Mozarts or curers of cancer are slaving away in the Maquiladoras along the Tijuana border, or in the Indonesian sweat shops? There are billions of people who will never become the people they could be, or the people they were meant to be, due to crushing poverty.

source: - "Tom Morello Leads The Occupy 'Guitarmy'". Interview with Diane Sweet, crooksandliars.com. May 22, 2012.

Topics: Crush, Cancer, Thinking

Poverty is curable, but it’s just not done, because it's not profitable. And that is the kind of violence that's perpetuated on humanity.

source: - Interview with Robin Grearson, logger.believermag.com. August 27, 2013.

Topics: Humanity, Done, Poverty

There's a unique component of music that is different from, the written pamphlet or a speech. There's something, when you get the right combination of rhythm, melody and the right lyrical couplet, that feels like truth in the reptilian brain. There's something hardwired in our D.N.A.. And when you get a large group of people singing together in solidarity, it's something that, in my experience, and I've played countless demonstrations and protests through the years, it's something that can really help a struggle.

source: - Source: www.truth-out.org

Topics: Struggle, Unique, People

My job is to steel the backbone of people on the frontlines of social justice struggles, and to put wind in sails of those struggles. And people who are fighting on a, on a daily basis, at a grass roots level.

source: - "Tom Morello Leads The Occupy 'Guitarmy'". Interview with Diane Sweet, crooksandliars.com. May 22, 2012.

Topics: Struggle, Fighting, Justice

Unity and resistance is a strong American trait.

source: - Source: www.billboard.com

Topics: Strong, Unity, Resistance

We have power not just with our voices, but we have economic power in what we do for a living, too.

source: - Source: www.billboard.com

Topics: Voice, Economic, Economic Power

There's not a country on earth that doesn't feel that it might be invaded by Donald Trump's regime.

source: - Source: www.billboard.com

Topics: Country, Earth, Might

There are many fans of hard rock music that have been wrongly pigeonholed as apathetic. This music is not music for the elitist coffeehouse culture in SoHo. It' s rock 'n' roll music for kids across the land, and I think that makes it much more subversive in a way, in that it has the form and the function of a powerful, populist music, but it can carry very incendiary messages.

Topics: Powerful, Kids, Thinking, Soho, Rock N Roll Music

Poverty is not an accident of, sort of, an economic spreadsheet. Poverty is a crime. There are criminals involved. And those criminals walk the streets as free men. What my music is about, and what - this from the riots in the streets of Greece and Spain to the people's uprisings in Egypt and Libya and Madison is about is holding those people accountable, those who are responsible for subverting the entire global economy and causing so much misery and then laughing about it with their, you know, clinking their champagne glasses on their yachts.

source: - "Tom Morello Leads The Occupy 'Guitarmy'". Interview with Diane Sweet, crooksandliars.com. May 22, 2012.

Topics: Men, Laughing, People

Every story has a point of view and whether it's by what one chooses to include or exclude from a story or whether it's a very specific agenda that is pushed, there is no such thing as objective media. Once you realize that it's more than just a marketplace of ideas, it's a battleground of ideas that are suppressed and the ideas that are pushed forward in the mainstream media are the ones that independent media has a chance to address. I think that the democratization of media in that way can be very helpful in allowing the truth to come out in a way that it might not on CNN or FOX.

source: - Source: www.truth-out.org

Topics: Independent, Thinking, Chance

Trump's ignorance in environmental science is a threat to the entire planet.

source: - Source: www.billboard.com

Topics: Ignorance, Environmental, Trump, Environmental Science

When I am most successful as a guitar player is when I'm able to just sort of lose myself. You stop thinking about technique or anything like that and just trying to evoke the emotion of that song brings, which is a very strong emotion for me.

source: - "Tom Morello Leads The Occupy 'Guitarmy'". Interview with Diane Sweet, crooksandliars.com. May 22, 2012.

Topics: Song, Strong, Successful

If Trump is going to govern in a fascist way, then we need to make America ungovernable.

source: - Source: www.billboard.com

Topics: America, Needs, Way

The reason why many young people in the Vietnam War era were active was their lives were threatened by the draft and they were going to perhaps be forced to go overseas and fight in an immoral war.

source: - Source: www.billboard.com

Topics: War, Fighting, People

I didn't abandon my studies. Because I was, through no - clarify this. Through no particular genius of my own, I was the first person from Libertyville Public High School to attend Harvard, not because I was smarter than anyone or better than anyone, but no one had ever applied before. It was like University of Illinois, a fine institution, was the sort of the upper echelon of places where kids went from that school. And so I felt sort of a duty to myself and my peers to continue with those studies, and to continue to, intellectually arm myself for my coming struggles.

source: - Source: www.truth-out.org

Topics: Struggle, School, Kids

You can kiss my Kiss-loving ass because Kiss was never a critic's band. It was a people's band.

source: - "Rock Hall Quotes: 20 Awesome Quips From Nirvana, Springsteen, Kiss and More" by Jessica Letkemann, www.hollywoodreporter.com. April 11, 2014.

Topics: Kissing, People, Band

I didn't choose to be a guitar player. That was something that felt like it was chosen for me. And with that blessing and curse, I, throughout my entire career, it's been my job to weave my convictions into my vocation. And whether I'm standing in the streets of Chicago or the Occupy Wall Street or in Madison, Wisconsin, my job is to steel the backbone of people on the frontlines of social justice struggles, and to put wind in sails of those struggles. And people who are fighting on a, on a daily basis, at a grass roots level, for the things that I believe in.

source: - Source: www.truth-out.org

Topics: Wall, Believe, Struggle