Serj Tankian Quotes

Sometimes it's better to have a benign dictator than a dumb democracy, to be honest.

We first fought... in the name of religion, then Communism, and now in the name of drugs and terrorism. Our excuses for global domination always change.

I think music has the ability to inspire people and to change hearts, and the heart has the power to change the mind, and the mind has the power to change the world.

The living ideas of the dead are more powerful and effective than the dead ideas of the living.

Life is that perfect fine line between ironies.

Pretending that we live doesn't make us alive.

Civilization is a failure. We need to think what we can do together in love and peace.

Science fails to recognize the single most potent element of human existence...faith.

Awareness in our society has flipped all types of injustice on its head.

We have the power to change our lives, and the world around us.

Anti-depressan ts Controlling tools of your system Making life more tolerable Making life more tolerable

The most important thing about music that I've learned after all this time is that to me, it's a way of reaching the truth.

Sometimes a good love song can change the world and create positive energy more than any political song can.

I'm not comfortable with just entertaining. Although I like entertaining, I also like bringing forward the truth of our times as minstrels used to in the old days.

I think every artist should follow their vision, their hearts is what they need to reveal, not something that society is looking out for.

I'd rather let the music speak for itself.

To deny a genocide because of convenience and expediency having to do with an illegal war or occupation in Iraq to me, is double hypocritical.

When I was younger, I was listening to a lot of Armenian music, you know, revolutionary music about freedom and protest. In the 70s I was listening to soul and the Bee Gees and ABBA, and funk.

I've worked with some great orchestras and amazing classical musicians, but I don't like the conceptualization of classical music as an elitist form of art.

We [americans] self-regulate ourselves, we self-censor ourselves a lot in this country instead of having someone else censor us so we can blame them. That's not good, either.

Touring and putting out records is fun and cool, but I've been doing it for a long time.

I've got my own studio, and I've got four- to five-hundred unreleased tracks. I've got stuff that's electronic, orchestral, jazz, I've got rock, I've got metal, you know, I don't have polka.

Day is just a collection of hours.

You can say a lot more with a poem than you can with a song, but with a song you can really be more powerful with it. You can express it a lot more powerfully.

People think our music's very aggressive or angry or whatever, and it's just the opposite, really... I like laughing. And I like being really calm before a show, and smiley.

What does civilization mean to you, and what would its ending bring to the world?

People always ask me 'do you think there should be more bands doing political music?' and I say 'absolutely not.'

It's important for all people, and not just people in bands, to speak out on social justice issues. That means journalists or plumbers have just as much of a responsibility to do that as artists.

As an artist, you never want to write the same song again, you always want to challenge yourself to writing in a different way.

It's probably a combination of personal and non-personal matters that have led us to where we are musically.

I think that the memory of Armenia's genocide opened my eyes at an early age to the existence of political cynicism.

The percentage of Americans in the prison system, has doubled since 1985.

I don't want to spend all my time working as an activist. I don't get satisfaction out of it. I'd rather be doing something else. I'm a musician.

I think nobody wants to hear a sermon. Well, some people do, but maybe not through music or not with me. No one wants to hear me give a speech that way.

Political statements are usually more direct, and it works with the upbeat music as well, for some reason, the directness of your statements.

I hate injustice, and I can't help but speak against it. But I don't want to get involved in politics.

With 'Elect the Dead,' I learned how to make a rock record without a rock band and make the rock record I've always wanted to make.

If you're using live bass versus orchestral bass, you've got to make sure that you're not stepping on the toes of the other elements, so you've got to balance it out.

As long as people are living their truth or their vision, whether they're activists or not, that's the important thing.

I think anytime that you go to the extreme of any mode of economics, be it capitalism or communism, you have these feedback mechanisms that make the system turn in on itself.

Science has failed our mother Earth.

I like African music, and I'm a huge Ravi Shankar fan.

People get so attached to a position which they identify themselves with that they just spurt it out, but they can't really give you a viable reason why they feel that way.

In the last few years I've been listening to jazz more than anything else. I listen to a lot of world music and experimental here and there.

Corporatization is the descendant of industrialization.

Spirit moves through all things.

Harout Pamboukjian is one of the biggest Armenian folk singers in the world. In the '70s, he was making these records that were really Zeppelin-influenced.

'Elect the Dead' is a rock record that takes you on a journey with different types of genres integrated, different lyrical themes digested, and many fun and colorful moments to enjoy.

I've always tried to listen to a lot of different music from around the world.

I'm a huge Beatles fan, but I've only really gotten into them as an adult.