A Quote by Howard Zinn

Music can be a distraction and an escape. Sometimes a welcome escape. You need it. But music can also serve a very important social function because music can do things that mere prose, mere ordinary political agitation can't do.

Howard Zinn

Quote Topics

Agitation Also Because Distraction Escape Function Important Mere Music Need Ordinary Political Prose Serve Social Sometimes Things Very Welcome

Quote Author

Howard Zinn
American - Historian
August 24, 1922 - January 27, 2010

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?

Oscar Wilde

You know how a lot of people say, 'I lose myself in music,' or 'I like to escape,' but I want my music to be more of an awakening. I want it to make people to be aware of life; I don't want my music to be a distraction. I want to light a path.

Jhene Aiko

I've always identified people's taste in music as being kind of hetero and/or homo - there's music people like because they feel like they have aesthetic similarity to it and the music they wish to create, and then there's music that represents the other, that they listen to because it represents an escape from the music that they have to make.

Owen Pallett

Everyone needs an escape, whether that is through music or humor. My personal escape is through both of those things so I thought why not combine them? But not in a cringe way, I don't want to make parody songs. I just want my music to have a humorous edge to it.

Ashnikko

When you come home and dad's making music, sister's making music and my mum is also very musical - you can't escape it.

David Alaba

I could be going through something in my life that I might not want to talk about in my music because my music is the way that I escape some of those things.

Tyga

The reason I'm not more political is because I have music. And from a young age, I needed it. After prison, my father came to America, joined the Army, fought in Vietnam - and was exposed to Agent Orange. He died a slow, horrible death. Music was my escape.

Gloria Estefan

The reason I’m not more political is because I have music. And from a young age, I needed it. After prison, my father came to America, joined the Army, fought in Vietnam - and was exposed to Agent Orange. He died a slow, horrible death. Music was my escape.

Gloria Estefan

The last thing I wanted to do was put politics into my music... because music was my escape.

Gloria Estefan

Music is escapism from the grim realities of life. But then as soon as you escape into the music, from my point of view, I found I had to deal with the very things that I thought I was running away from. I wanted to hit those problems on the head and resolve them. So they didn't remain as issues in my psyche.

John Lydon

Indie music is 'it' now. It's kind of a revolution to the music: 1980s, 1990s music was getting very sanitized; they were complying with the music industry. Music was getting more and more dead in a way. Now, because of the social climate that's very severe, the artists are compelled to start being real. It's really great that indie music is now.

Yoko Ono

Poetry is halfway between prose and music: it is sometimes like an intimate conversation, in words and phrases which need not be fully uttered, and sometimes like dancing and wordless music.

Gilbert Highet

We like to categorize things into showy things and deep things, you know, and things that are high music - important music - and shallow music. And I think that's dangerous, because there's often a mix of both.

Joshua Bell

Faced with today's problems and disappointments , many people will try to escape from their responsibility. Escape in selfishness, escape in sexual pleasure, escape in drugs, escape in violence, escape in indifference and cynical attitudes. I propose to you the option of love, which is the opposite of escape.