Top 56 Quotes & Sayings by Mikis Theodorakis
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis.
Last updated on December 23, 2024.
I put one questions. For whom I compose? My answer is I wanted to address to all my people. And if I write music for the Greek people because I'm Greek, I compose for all the people.
My work is based upon contemporary Greek poetry - poetry which is concerned with the problems of today's civilization and, of course, with simple personal feelings of love, nostalgia, etc.
In the Averoff prison hospital I saw men who had had the bones in their feet broken by the severity of the torture.
We saw that on the Turkish side there was a sincere wish for peace. But before I could even put my foot back on Greek soil people called me a traitor.
I like always to be contemporary. I like to deal with the things of today.
I will continue to be critical of the system. Every honest patriot continues to fight against it.
My music had two protagonists, me and the Greek people.
We cry. The Greeks cry because we have not an objective today. Yesterday we have objective to put off the dictatorship. Today the objective is to find ourselves.
I like to have the feeling I'm creating something.
The conservatory professors thought everything should sound like French and German symphonies. But to my ear, bouzouki songs, which tell the sufferings and heartaches of ordinary people, offered a way to make classical music available not just to the upper classes.
In my youth there must have been 15 synagogues in Salonika alone.
I don't believe there is anti-Semitism in Europe. There is a reaction against the policy of Sharon and Bush. I think it's artificial to think there is a new anti-Semitism. It's an excuse. It's a way to avoid self-criticism.
I mixed with a lot of peasants, workers, artists and writers, all deprived of work. That's when I understood human beings have an instinct toward knowledge.
In America the Jewish community is very strong. It controls much of the economy. Certainly the mass media.
I have been trying for years to perform in America. Now the first time I am here there is a strike. I must play. It is what I must do.
In Greece, the picket line is forbidden.
I will always be a political animal.
I got hundreds and hundreds of poisonous e-mails from Jews all over the world. I couldn't understand this hatred toward me. I fought against racism all my life. I was for Israel. I wrote 'Mauthausen.' After all that, how could I become from one day to the next an anti-Semite?
I'm not a communist or social democrat or anything else. I'm a free man.
All our problems happened because the Americans made all the decisions.
A man who goes to jail for his ideas is much freer than his keepers.
This taste of freedom is still bitter because left in Athens are my wife and my two children and because so many of my comrades are suffering.
Always I have lived with two sounds - one political, one musical.
I was thankful to him, this man who freed me. At the same time I was annoyed be cause the man who freed me doesn't have the right to speak for me. I had no intention to disavow my old principles. But to disavow Servan Schreiber made for problems.
My father's father fought to free Crete from the Turks, who expelled my mother from her ancestral home in Asia Minor in 1922. So how could I stand aside from my country's troubles?
I write for all the peoples of all the world.
When you think of it, you know, probably the biggest victim of our epoch is the American people because of all the crimes committed in its name.
I would not sacrifice myself for a system like the Soviet system to be established in Greece.
Macedonia was, is and will forever be Greek.
I've been uprooted. I don't think a tree that's been uprooted as a happy tree and I'm not very happy. I can't be. I do not accept to be.
For me the root of evil today is the policy of President Bush. It is a fascist policy. I cannot understand how is it that the Jewish people, who have been the victims of Nazism, can support such a fascist policy. No other people in the world support those policies but Israel! This situation saddens me.
Oh, what am I for the Frenchman or the Italian? A guy who was in prison, a revolutionary, somebody they once read something about in the newspaper - but not me.
I love the Jewish people, I love the Jews!
New York is a town of my height.
All the time I see things that remind me very much of the 1930s.
My dream is to turn Europe into 300 million princes.
There was a Yugoslav film about partisans that I've done the music for, and then I've promised to score a French film called 'Biribi' about detention camps at the turn of the century.
American Jews are behind the world economic crisis that has hit Greece also.
Greece is the only country in the Balkans that does not have territorial designs on its neighbors and wants to live in peace with them.
I compose for the common man, for our epoch.
Those who had talked to us about national pride and Christian brotherly love were the first to come to terms or actively collaborate with the Germans. It was an immense blow to my entire intellectual and emotional existence.
I'm an anti-Semite but I love Jews.
When I was still a child, there was the Metaxis, a Fascist Youth Movement in which all subteenagers and teenagers were obligatory members, where they tried to imbue us with two ideals - nationalism and Christianity.
The Greeks have needlessly been maneuvered towards the abyss.
I've directed fragmentarily at the Herod Atticus, but never before a popular laiko unitals concert.
In Greece there is a very particular situation because on one hand the colonels took away everyone's political rights, but at the same time the economic and social situation improved.
For films, I'm very difficult.
I wanted to unite the popular and the serious, and to make a popular symphony, a popular oratorio.
I'll write three operas - one for Verdi, one for Puccini, and one for Bellini.
The established politicians, who before the war preached national pride and Christian love, were the first to collaborate with the Germans. But the communists, who as children we'd been taught to fear, kept a resistance movement alive, living and dying true to their ideals.
I am a song of my times. I wasn't living in Vienna, like Mozart or Beethoven. In my circumstances, it was impossible to be indifferent.
We people, maybe because we have the greatest wisdom, we are also mad. We destroy the harmony of the world.
Whether art is music or cinema or whatever, it really is art only when it is in touch with the people - forced to respond to their agonies, their joys and their aspirations.
I have again decided to leave my cultural obligations and music to enter the political arena this time to contribute with all my force to ending, once and for all, the PASOK state.
I want to leave this world as a Communist.
We're in danger! Zionism and it leaders are here, meeting in our country! This is no laughing matter.
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