A Quote by Toni Morrison

The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.

Toni Morrison

Quote Topics

Able Art Art Is Beautiful Best Best Art Irrevocably Make Ought Political Same Same Time Time

Quote Author

Toni Morrison
American - Novelist
February 18, 1931 - August 5, 2019

Some people feel that it's controversial if I say that because my dad is known as a political artist. But I don't really believe that he was a political artist. I think some of his songs were political, and I think they were incredible because he was able to make art that was political and that wasn't pedantic. But I think he was unique in being able to do that.

Sean Lennon

The attempt to divide art and politics is a bourgeois which says good poetry, art, cannot be political, but since everything is … political, even an artist or work that claims not to have any politics is making a political statement by that act.

Amiri Baraka

Art is inherently political. Even trying to make a film that has nothing to do with politics is, in and of itself, a political act.

Barry Jenkins

Drawing the kind of comics that I do takes so long that to specifically address something as transitory as a political matter in it would be about as effective as composing a symphony with hopes that it would depose a despot. On top of that, I personally don't think that my version of art is the best way to deal with political issues at all, or, more specifically, the place to make a point. Not that art can't, but it's the rare art that still creates something lasting if its main aim was purely to change a particular unfair social structure.

Chris Ware

War is not merely a political act but a real political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, a carrying out of the same by other means.

Carl von Clausewitz

[Freedom] is the greatest of political goods. I do not say freedom is the greatest of all goods: the best things come from within they are such things as creative art, and love, and thought. Such things can be helped or hindered by political conditions, but not actually produced by them; and freedom is, both in itself and in its relation to these other goods the best thing that political and economic conditions can secure.

Bertrand Russell

Let me see: art and activism. I can always fall back on, "the question should be, what isn't political? Everything you do is political, even if it's abstract. You're making a political statement even if it's unwittingly." I think so much of art is unconscious anyway, the artist doesn't know the real reason they're doing it. They're just kind of going along with it intuitively.

Eric Drooker

I think, for some artists, the fear of taking on a political identity stems from not wanting to be pigeonholed as political actor or a political musician. It becomes this thing where somehow your art can no longer exist on its own and be multifaceted.

Carrie Brownstein

As a composer, I believe that music has the power to inspire a renewal of human consciousness, culture, and politics. And yet I refuse to make political art. More often than not political art fails as politics, and all too often it fails as art. To reach its fullest power, to be most moving and most fully useful to us, art must be itself.

John Luther Adams

Putting something in a movie because it's in the news doesn't make it political to me. If you're not going outside the same old, same old, if you're not pushing the envelope, then you're not doing anything. A good movie is a political thing.

Sean Penn

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible... Thus, political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness... Political language [is] designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.

George Orwell

Very early on I was interested in doing political art, but it was not feminist political art.

Michelle Stuart

If the Bank of Canada does want to start getting more and more political, then it will be held to the same level of political accountability as other political entities.

Pierre Poilievre

Let's face it: Many on the political right believe this president ought not to be there - they oppose him not for his polices and political view but for who he is, an African American!

Sam Donaldson

Whether you want it or not, your genes have a political past, your skin a political tone. your eyes a political color. ... you walk with political steps on political ground.