Top 128 Quotes & Sayings by Boots Riley - Page 2

The folks that are suggesting Occupy move to electoral politics are ignoring history, ignoring what actually creates change. People get involved in electoral politics because they think there is no movement that can create change.

'Redistributing the wealth' - that phrase gets used so much that you almost get numb to it.

The crux of our power isn't only in our voice. It is in our economic function in society.

The opportunism of electoral politics makes people lie to each other.

I'm not trying to make a speech on CD because who wants to buy that?

Making movies seemed so impossible as far as getting my ideas funded.

There's the part of me that's the organizer, part of me that's the artist, part of me that's the person who, even with those two things, wants to figure out what my place in the world is. How to engage with it and whether my life has any meaning.

That punk approach of 'We don't wanna get big' is really a bourgeois thing. It's not a tactic of people that actually have been successful at changing things.

I used to get worried about writing a love song, because everyone else is doing them, and there are already enough of them out there. But I came to realize that there's a reason for that: Love is powerful, one of the most powerful emotions there is.

Any collective action is made up of individuals who one day decided not to sit and watch anymore.

I just look at music as a retreat from organizing. It's like a tug-of-war with me. Music can be effective, but it's not any good if there isn't a grass-roots movement going on to support it.

The Box would not play 'Takin' These' because we had a scene where we were taking furniture out of Rockefeller's mansion and giving the stuff out on the street for free.

The album 'Party Music' is a beautiful album, and people need to hear it.

I thought my parents were always having card parties - and they were - but they were actually also having meetings to organize people. My older sister would be part of youth organizing, and she'd have dance parties. People would be dancing and talking about how to improve their neighborhood.

You make art, you make it from what you know, and that's the best way to make art. You get lost in the details and make something that feels like it's yours.

What I wanted to do is put forth, musically, the idea that there's hope that we can change the system.

I think art is communication. To that extent, it can be the words between the words. It has a possibility of communicating something more than people can do with prose or just talking.

That existential crisis is something you rarely see portrayed by black characters; the idea that people think about their own existence and that they have hopes and dreams is taken away from people of color in their representation.

Music is first for me. How the music makes me feel, it's like energy. It has to match my life. What's happening around me or to me. That's where it comes from.

Trying to get somebody to read your script and you're a musician? That's the last person whose script you're gonna read!

I can run the gamut with beats that no one else would think of. I'm not a trained musician, so I focus on what feels right before I dispatch to writing.

Every progressive movement in U.S. history has been portrayed negatively by the media at the time it happened.

I'd been working since I was eleven so I could buy my own comic books. I was that kid knocking on your door, selling subscriptions to the paper and crying because I wasn't going to sell that last paper that would allow me to go to Disneyland.

I have a problem with superheroes in general because, politically, superheroes are cops. Superheroes work with the government to uphold the law. And who do the laws work for?

A lot of libertarians and ultra-capitalists like to put out this idea that competition makes for better creativity. But it's just because we don't see all the creativity that's been crushed.

We all - even at a base level, even a Republican - understand that the people with the money are the ones with the power. We all learn that.

What I like about music is that you make a song, you've got your ideas in it, and people make that song part of their life - they hang out with their friends to it, they get in arguments to it, they get married to it, they get divorced to it. It's in their world, and it takes on its own life.

I think most people would love for us to be a socialist society.

The tech world is not a new phenomenon; it's a new era.

Going to school in San Francisco, you're not going to meet as many people that are making films as you would if you went to film school in New York or L.A.

I've always been about, how do I get my ideas out to the most people?

I chose to do art in the way I always do it, which is with all the crazy contradictions of life in there.

The truth is, every movie is a message movie. It's just that most movies have messages that are in lock step with the status quo.

I listen to everything from The Cure and The Clash to Prince and George Clinton.

There's this zeitgeist happening, and people are more open to 'Sorry to Bother You' being a hit with 'Get Out' being out there. But that zeitgeist is also happening because of the movements going back to Occupy and Black Lives Matter. Usually, film is years behind. It just so happens that, this time, everything is lining up.

Sometimes my influences are really on my sleeve. So I just make sure to wear a lot of sleeves.

With a movie, you have the power of putting out an idea about the world and for people to take it seriously.

Art can end up answering questions or asking questions. But when it's not connected to actual movements, it doesn't ask the right questions.

I was actually really good at telemarketing.

If you tell a story that's only allegory, then it doesn't help you at all. If it doesn't bring some emotional charge, then it's just talking about something.

Rappers are usually rapping about knowledge they think people need to get by in the world. If there's no movement that gives the idea that the knowledge people need is how to take over the system, what they see is that people need to know how to hustle; people need to know how to survive.

Death to the pigs is my basic statement.

People give out compliments because it's polite.

I've been involved in a lot of different kinds of projects. I've been on straight hip hop tours. I've been on underground rock tours. I've been on multimillion selling rock shows. I've been in the jam band thing, and both commercial and underground hip hop. Very few people listen to one kind of music.

A lot of us don’t get a sense of our personal power. I know the vast difference that one person can make in changing things.

Becoming a father made me a lot more sentimental than I ever was before. I never cried at movies before I became a parent. I feel music more intensely. I think of my political ideas as ideas about how I want to interact with other human beings as opposed to abstract theories about how the world should be.

When I was five years old, me and my cousin got into a fistfight because when "That's the Way (I Like It)" came on the radio, he said, "That's my song," and I said, "No, that's my song."

A lot of what we say and do are regurgitated things that have to do with what we think we're supposed to be saying and doing.

What I'm trying to do is make music that people relate to, that talks about ideas that are personal but also make that connection to trying to make revolutionary change, and I don't need to change my music to get to a certain audience.

I was an avowed professional revolutionary by the time I was 15.

In high school, everybody rapped. You just pounded on the table.

I wanted to write a song about sexism, but I didn't want to do it in a mechanical way and be like, "Don't be sexist!" because that's not how I talk in regular life.

I always write knowing that people will hear it, but also hoping they'll see it. So a lot of times I make lyrical decisions based on what looks better. Also I write based on what I saw for a video. I obsess over lyrics in the hopes that they'll endure in different ways. I'm very precious about it.

I am a person who always feels like I am not doing the right thing because there's always so many things that need to get done.

I wanted to be part of changing the world. I don't want to just stand by and watch it be however it is.

What first got me involved in politics was being 14, and a youth organizer comes to my house with a van full of 14 year old girls. "Hey, you want to go to the beach with us? But first we're going to go support the cannery workers' strike in Watsonville."

What the media is playing is what people want is really a false idea. Capitalism and people who control the market have a large hand in everything. It doesn't have anything to do with figuring out what the crowd wants to hear. It has to do with the media deciding what they think people want to hear.

I have tried to write songs quickly that get scrapped. I've also taken a long time on songs that get scrapped because you can over-think something, and you've squeezed the life out of it. As opposed to work of art, it looks like a really great work of craftsmanship.

Sometimes it takes time to get into what ideas actually mean to you. Even when you're not writing a song, it's like that.

In reality, I know I'm not hurt directly by sexism; however, my life is made less because of it, so I started thinking about the fallout from relationships in which people feed off each other.