Top 100 Saul Williams Quotes
#1. The role that theater has placed in enhancing consciousness and moving systems ahead. I think of what South African theater meant for the apartheid movement, for example. I think of what music has meant for so many social movements across time.
Saul Williams
#2. The organization of self, and all self-aligning principles would be those that I promote.
Saul Williams
#3. I was fed by the music I listened to as a kid. Hip-hop fed me psychologically, spiritually, politically. I learned from that music.
Saul Williams
#4. Legislation won't necessarily start a riot. But the right song can make someone pick up a chair.
Saul Williams
#5. Who me? I play scales. The scales of
dead fish of oil-slicked seas. My sister
blows wind through the hollows of fallen
trees. And we are the echoes of eternity.
Maybe you've heard of us.
We do rebirths, revolts, and resurrections.
Saul Williams
#6. I dance for no reason, for reasons you can't dance,
Call me an activist of intellectualized circumstance
You can't learn my steps until you unlearn your thoughts Spirit, soul, can't be store-bought.
Saul Williams
#7. I spend my time sitting in train stations, parks, parking lots, cafes, just looking at people - eavesdropping, basically. I'm vulnerable to all of it.
Saul Williams
#8. Punk rock meditation, that's what keeps it going. That's how I let go, you know. It's exactly what I do, I blast it and run around crazy banging my head on the wall.
Saul Williams
#9. The forecast is
we kiss goodbye and never hello
all kisses are then parting kisses
Saul Williams
#10. I don't really believe in writer's block or anything like that. If I'm not feeling words, I may pick up an instrument and play with sounds or delve into different types of creativity and expression.
Saul Williams
#11. We cannot continually barricade ourselves under some falsified idea of race, because our idea of blackness and race is simply reactionary. Africans didn't walk around Africa being black and proud, they walked around proud.
Saul Williams
#12. There is no music more powerful than hip-hop. No other music so purely demands an instant affirmative on such a global scale. When the beat drops, people nod their heads, "yes," in the same way that they would in conversation with a loved one, a parent, professor, or minister.
Saul Williams
#13. I think everybody on this planet does that - trying to capture your dream after you wake up.
Saul Williams
#14. Yes, there is a science to the aroma of sleeping women
(and to think of the girlfriend I was tempted to break up with because she slept too much)
i now know, they NURTURED here there: they slept in packs dreamt in cycles nursed her in shifts and became her ON ROTATION
Saul Williams
#15. It's not the rules everywhere, you know? That's not the rules everywhere - that things have to be dumbed down in order to become massively popular. And that hasn't always been the rule, even in America.
Saul Williams
#16. I hear the weed is really strong in California ...
Saul Williams
#17. I've always been inspired by a lot of work coming out of the UK.
Saul Williams
#18. Music has always pushed ahead social movements and can do much more than just dumb down a populace.
Saul Williams
#19. The only reason I've been so critical of hip-hop is because I've always been aware of the effect that it has, and the reflection that it gives of the African-American community.
Saul Williams
#20. More people than ever are slowly but surely turning their ears toward poetry.
Saul Williams
#21. What's wrong with hip-hop is the system that controls the definition of it. There needs to be more balance on the airwaves.
Saul Williams
#22. I surrendered my beliefs
and found myself at the tree of life
injecting my story into the veins of leaves
only to find that stories like forests
are subject to seasons
Saul Williams
#23. The hero is the person who's afraid to run away.
Saul Williams
#24. I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written.
Saul Williams
#25. Dying is something you have no control over. Why waste your life being afraid of it?
Saul Williams
#26. I'm usually trying to get back into the dream or analyzing the dream. And yeah, the days, most days begin like that.
Saul Williams
#28. The downfall of the industry seems to actually be good for art. I think the industry will find their way once the focus shifts from its greed-based origins, downsizes, and begins to support creative visions that speak to our times and shifting ideals.
Saul Williams
#29. There's no doubt in my mind that 'Slam' is going to be huge. It's a film about the power of language. People are going to see this and get blown away.
Saul Williams
#30. The anchor man thrown overboard has simply rooted us in history's repeating cycle
Saul Williams
#31. I don't trust the man
that i am becoming
he seems too much
and seldom is
Saul Williams
#32. She kissed as if she, alone, could forge the signature of the sun
Saul Williams
#33. Art itself is underserved when we don't realize the power of it.
Saul Williams
#34. Sometimes our thoughts and feelings are our most prized possessions ... and then there are times to let go of your possessions and wander.
Saul Williams
#35. I have a very family-like connection to hip-hop, which is why it frustrates me so much.
Saul Williams
#36. Art can play a major role. I look at art as an alternative source of energy, the same way we might look at wind or solar or lithium batteries.
Saul Williams
#37. I think it's a mistake where rap music is these days. It doesn't seem to be able to look out of the ghetto and that's ultimately unfortunate, because it defines our limitations.
Saul Williams
#38. If we're gonna progress as a people we are going to realise that, as one of my favourite poets says, the other is a lie. There are no other people. Race is a social construct.
Saul Williams
#39. When I look at certain aspects of popular culture - not everything because I like a lot of things - sometimes my heart breaks a little bit, just a little bit. I begin to ponder what happened to this generation, I don't know.
Saul Williams
#40. I used to have weird practices in crowded used-book stores in New York where I'd go in and just stomp my foot and see what fell from the shelf. And of course, because it's an unexpected encounter, there's always some magic that comes from it.
Saul Williams
#41. I am no earthling. I drink moonshine on Mars
and mistake meteors for stars 'cause I can't hold
my liquor. But I can hold my breath and ascend
like wind to the black hole and play galaxophones
on the fire escape of your soul.
Saul Williams
#42. It was always important to me to be that kid who could rock the party as well as rock the English professor's mind.
Saul Williams
#43. My father's a preacher, my mother's a teacher, thus ... I rhyme.
Saul Williams
#44. Jay Z and President Bush have a lot in common, that same brash confidence.
Saul Williams
#45. American culture is often so self-consumed that we often think that our problems are just our problems.
Saul Williams
#46. I was always making up rhymes. But I never thought that poetry would become my life.
Saul Williams
#47. I presented my feminine side with flowers. She cut
the stems and placed them gently down my throat.
And these tu lips might soon eclipse your brightest
hopes.
Saul Williams
#48. The most powerful political voices are those with a different way of seeing and processing the world and the sounds that emanate from it.
Saul Williams
#49. When I can feel you breathing into me i, like a stone gargoyle
atop some crumbling building,
spring to life
a resuscitated
angel.
Saul Williams
#50. I'm very excited about the resurgence of vinyl which seems to parallel a growing interest in live performance.
Saul Williams
#51. The music aids the message, it's there to punctuate and abbreviate and shape the silence.
Saul Williams
#52. You can't do anything that's not political in this time and age.
Saul Williams
#53. I am like a survivor
of the flood
walking through the streets
drenched with
God
surprised that all of the
drowned victims
are still walking and talking
Saul Williams
#55. My love is my soul's imagination ...
how do I love you ... imagine.
Saul Williams
#56. There's so much to be found in literature, especially if you don't have the money to travel or the means to get out of your neighborhood or get off work.
Saul Williams
#58. The MC has to be just that, a master in control. They can show no signs of weakness.
Saul Williams
#59. Pools of blood are not recreational even lifeguards drown when the undertow breaks bread with the underbelly demons disguised as sharks have not put enough thought into their costumes a wiseman stays ashore when pointed fins read like italian subtitles the end is near ( ... ) the beginning
Saul Williams
#60. I laced my shoes with sorrow
and walked a weary road
dead end streets
don't come undone
with double knots
wing tipped shoes
that walk on air
through vacant lots
Saul Williams
#61. I've never believed it's really so important that you conform to the ways of the system in order to beat the system. I think that the system follows a great deal.
Saul Williams
#63. The wind plays the world like an instrument. Blows through trees like flutes. But trees won't grow in cement. And as heart beats bring percussion fallen trees bring repercussions. Cities play upon our souls like broken drums.
Saul Williams
#64. They say that I am a poet I wonder what they would say if they saw me from the inside I bottle emotions and place them into the sea for others to unbottle on distant shores I am unsure as to whether they ever reach and for that matter as to whether I ever get my point across or my love
Saul Williams
#65. What I'm aiming to do within hip-hop is to point out that the music itself is powerful; it reaches so many people.
Saul Williams
#66. Some rather seek up high
Than dig and grind that inner truth
Saul Williams
#67. Half of the popcorn sh-t that's out there, we know it's popcorn. But we're like, "It's my guilty pleasure." I feel like we have more guilty pleasure than actual f - kin' pleasure.
Saul Williams
#68. I didn't ever want to make a rap album. I considered it too limiting. Now that's exactly what I've gone and done.
Saul Williams
#69. I think that the heart is a lot like those wonderful fruit, like coconut and mangoes, you know, you have to break the skin, you have to break it open to get to the good part.
Saul Williams
#70. Honestly, I don't always want to get up in the mornings, but I do anyway.
Saul Williams
#71. I can't say that I always want to get out of bed, you know.
Saul Williams
#72. There is nothing more negligent than attempting to address a problem one finds on a branch than by censoring the leaves.
Saul Williams
#73. It's crazy when you see very little reflection between what's played on the radio and what people are talking about in the streets. It lets you know how far off we are from a real movement.
Saul Williams
#74. I think everything has its place. So if the ideas or the fluidity isn't coming in writing, maybe it's related to ingestions.
Saul Williams
#75. I think it's misleading to think that art is only there for escapism, only there for our dreams of being rich and f - king whoever we wanna f - k.
Saul Williams
#76. Your library teacher would say, "What happens to a generation that doesn't read the Classics?" Me, I'm not your library teacher. But I have some of the same questions and concerns, you know?
Saul Williams
#77. I want to connect music to its highest power - which is heightening consciousness and affecting people's reality. That can't be done in normal ways, not according to my experience.
Saul Williams
#78. You can travel through literature, and you can expand your mind through literature. It's so cheap to buy that kind of ticket.
Saul Williams
#79. I remember back in the day when Chuck D called hip-hop the 'black people's CNN.' Well now, hip-hop is more like Fox News. It's biased, and highly suspect.
Saul Williams
#80. For all the ghosts and corpses that shall never know the breath of our children
so long
for the sacrifice and endurance of our mothers and the sustained breath of our fathers
we live
Saul Williams
#81. She stuck a bookmark in his heart and walked away.
Saul Williams
#82. I am hoping for peaceful transition into a new age. Obama has already played a great role in initiating us into that vision. If he were to be harmed in any way, it would spawn the birth of a million Obamas.
Saul Williams
#85. We are unraveling our navels so that we may ingest the sun.
We are not afraid of the darkness.
We trust that the moon shall guide us.
We are determining the future at this very moment.
We know that the heart is the philosopher's stone.
Our music is our alchemy.
Saul Williams
#88. The greatest Americans have not been born yet they are waiting patiently for the past to die.
Saul Williams
#89. I have offered myself to the inkwell of the wordsmith that I might be shaped into new terms of being.
Saul Williams
#90. You change the beat up, you might change the way people dance to the music. If you change the way they move, maybe they'll think about it differently.
Saul Williams
#91. Hip-hop is still cool at a party. But to me, hip-hop has never been strictly a party; it is also there to elevate consciousness.
Saul Williams
#93. When I finally decide that I'm ready to get out of bed, it could be the sunlight, it could be the fact that I'm awake, and, OK, first of all, I wake up in the morning because I have to go to the bathroom.
Saul Williams
#94. Only through new words might new worlds be called into order
Saul Williams
#95. A lie preserved in stained glass doesn't make it more true.
Saul Williams
#96. I think that good writing is based on good reading. Maybe it's not about writing today, maybe it's about reading today. Maybe it's about finding the sort of book you would never read.
Saul Williams
#97. We all have different relationships with music. But the music is always there.
Saul Williams
#98. She, the first-born daughter of water, faced
darkness and smiled. Took mystery as her
lover and raised light as her child. Man that
shit was wild. You should have seen how
they ran. She woke up in an alley with a gun
in her hand. Tupac in lotus form, Ennis' blood
on his hands.
Saul Williams
#99. I have an acquired taste for language, yet it is seldom an actual focus of mine.
Saul Williams
#100. Intelligence is intuitive you needn't learn to love unless you've been taught to fear and hate
Saul Williams
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