Top 73 Serj Tankian Quotes

#1. I've had people come up to me with the strangest interpretations of what my lyrics might mean, and I'm like, "You go! I never thought of that, but that works,"...I think that true art is a universal reflection, and true artists are just messengers of that reflection or, at best, skilled presentors.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #33845
#2. I think it's my interaction with journalists that has pegged me more as political than my actual records, although they have obviously political aspects to them as well.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #68430
#3. I believe very firmly that indigenous populations had a really good, intuitive understanding of why we're here. And we're trying to gain that same understanding through psychology and intellect in modern civilization.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #75563
#4. 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.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #111983
#5. 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.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #144468
#6. 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.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #152588
#7. 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.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #158453
#8. Pretending that we live doesn't make us alive.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #176845
#9. We have the power to change our lives, and the world around us.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #201136
#10. In terms of political things, I think it's important to be more direct in terms of political statements. I think in terms of philosophical and things that you plant things and see them grow lyrically or musically, it's okay to be subtle.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #201217
#11. As long as people are living their truth or their vision, whether they're activists or not, that's the important thing.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #264159
#12. A lot of pop music is based on trying to make people remember it so that they'll buy it. To me, it was not about that.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #267062
#13. 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.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #278747
#14. 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.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #301090
#15. 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.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #392845
#16. 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.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #394452
#17. '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.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #408806
#18. Science has failed our mother Earth.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #469646
#19. I am more interested in how people interpret the phrase 'Elect The Dead' than what I may or may not have intended. I named the album after the track, which is a spiritual song about love, life and death and is the heaviest song on the album without having any heavy instruments.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #471775
#20. 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.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #508469
#21. Composing is what I love most from what I do. Each genre has a unique expression that you cannot supplant with another. All the records co-inspire each other though they are not tied conceptually in any way to another.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #527177
#22. I think that the memory of Armenia's genocide opened my eyes at an early age to the existence of political cynicism.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #539192
#23. The percentage of Americans in the prison system, has doubled since 1985.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #558280
#24. 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.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #593596
#25. What does civilization mean to you, and what would its ending bring to the world?

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #602538
#26. Sometimes a good love song can change the world and create positive energy more than any political song can.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #610924
#27. I've always worked on all different types of music, some with specific project goals and deadlines and some not. Sometimes I would write a piece of music that is almost like a film score or weird electro pieces, wherever the muse took me, and I still do that.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #612468
#28. I'd rather let the music speak for itself.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #617372
#29. It's the idea of a multi-sensory experience stemming from music that opened my interest into painting, to be honest.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #618953
#30. We're addicted to this concept of civilization - we can't imagine living outside of it because we've had it for 10,000 years, all of what we call history. But according to archaeologists, humanity has been on this planet for millions of years in indigenous form.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #629396
#31. 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.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #643182
#32. Science fails to recognize the single most potent element of human existence ... faith.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #662759
#33. I write music when I'm free and for no particular project in mind.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #669452
#34. Sometimes it's better to have a benign dictator than a dumb democracy, to be honest.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #672240
#35. 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.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #694218
#36. I'm a huge Beatles fan, but I've only really gotten into them as an adult.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #791241
#37. 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.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #834939
#38. Spirit moves through all things.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #953180
#39. Awareness in our society has flipped all types of injustice on its head.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #962980
#40. Political statements are usually more direct, and it works with the upbeat music as well, for some reason, the directness of your statements.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #978937
#41. 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.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #986759
#42. Touring and putting out records is fun and cool, but I've been doing it for a long time.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1000057
#43. With most of the songs and music that I've composed, irrespective of the myriad videos made, I was always careful not to overly define the experience, leaving room for people to internalize things for themselves, making their experience more integral.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1049607
#44. 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.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1053067
#45. Corporatization is the descendant of industrialization.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1088231
#46. My two interests are spirituality and politics. I would mesh them in some way; maybe try to figure out the politics of spirituality, or the spirituality of politics. Or maybe come up with this really crazy naive solution for the end of civilization.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1093357
#47. In America, there's more of the question, should music be political or should it just be for entertainment purposes, whereas around the world that's not even an issue. I think people just assume that music should be everything.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1113762
#48. Life is that perfect fine line between ironies.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1131692
#49. It's probably a combination of personal and non-personal matters that have led us to where we are musically.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1140524
#50. I've always tried to listen to a lot of different music from around the world.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1150505
#51. With rock music, the amount of power that you can generate, the intensity behind the intentions of your lyrics that you can really reflect through rock music - you can't do that in jazz. You can't do that with classical.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1207305
#52. Civilization is a failure. We need to think what we can do together in love and peace.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1228664
#53. 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.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1250264
#54. People always ask me 'do you think there should be more bands doing political music?' and I say 'absolutely not.'

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1280906
#55. The living ideas of the dead are more powerful and effective than the dead ideas of the living.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1296144
#56. Day is just a collection of hours.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1300985
#57. I like African music, and I'm a huge Ravi Shankar fan.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1331267
#58. I think music is a powerful medium because it co-inspires. It inspires the artist who then inspires the listener, and it's a back-and-forth process.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1338254
#59. If you allow for a purely capitalistic society, without any type of regulation at all, you will get one monopoly that will eat all of the smaller fish and own everything, and then you'll have zero capitalism, zero competition - it would just be one giant company.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1398560
#60. Anti-depressan ts
Controlling tools of your system
Making life more tolerable
Making life more tolerable

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1436863
#61. Capitalism unchecked is not a democratic system.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1437094
#62. I think every artist should follow their vision, their hearts is what they need to reveal, not something that society is looking out for.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1459744
#63. 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.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1479658
#64. We are the cause of a world that's gone wrong. Nature will survive us, we've been wrong after all. We are the cause of a world that's gone wrong. Wouldn't it be great to heal the world with only a song? (Sky is Over)

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1532828
#65. I think music is an intuitive force. It's this beautiful wave that connects all of us and inspires us, and I think music has the ability - when you listen to a song, you're not immediately thinking about the lyrics or what's going on in the mind of the writer, you're feeling the song.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1577443
#66. 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.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1594268
#67. 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.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1683396
#68. I like having songs that go from the personal to the kind of inter-relational, universal, because everything comes back to micro/macro and everything's tied in.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1755848
#69. I have a more direct avenue to expression as an artist than I ever would as a politician.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1756989
#70. I don't find most people to be as politically engaged as I am. I do find people that appreciate eye-opening events and words, and who want to learn more about what's going on. I do find people with a lot of opinions. And I get a lot of people who come up to me and give us props for what we do.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1790438
#71. I think I might write a book. I like writing. People have asked me if I would get into politics, but I think I feel a lot more effective being a representative of truth through the arts.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1815302
#72. As an artist, you never want to write the same song again, you always want to challenge yourself to writing in a different way.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1846173
#73. 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.

Serj Tankian

Serj Tankian Quotes #1868824

Famous Authors

Popular Topics

Scroll to Top