Protest Song Quotes

#1. I understand why people get desensitized and roll their eyes when they hear a protest song, or even a politician making some flowery speech. It doesn't really change anything.

Conor Oberst

#2. The nice thing about a protest song is that it takes the complaint, the fussing, the finger-pointing, and gives it an added component of sociable harmony.

Nicholson Baker

#3. In the '60s, when I was growing up, one of the great elements of American culture was the protest song. There were songs about the civil rights movement, the women's rights movement, the antiwar movement. It wasn't just Bob Dylan, it was everybody at the time.

George Clooney

#4. The hardest song to write is a protest song, a topical song with meaning.

Joan Baez

#5. A protest song is a song
that's so specific that you
cannot mistake it for bullshit

Phil Ochs

#6. Don't I deserve something? Somebody to be my best friend. To know me
inside and out and still like me. Everybody else has someone who loves them. All I'm asking for is
this nice boy to keep being my friend.

Angela Morrison

#7. thinking of us, our struggles and pain, grieves in me a song more dismal than the sparrows' protest to the morning rain

John J. Geddes

#8. Mind is not really 'inside' us in the same sense that our intestines are. Our individuality is a kind of eddy in the sea of mind, a reflection of the total identity of the universal humanity.

Colin Wilson

#9. What happens if we become adults waiting for a band that's never coming back?

John Green

#10. El Salvador is a democracy so it's not surprising that there are many voices to be heard here. Yet in my conversations with Salvadorans ... I have heard a single voice.

Dan Quayle

#11. In the largest sense, every work of art is protest ... A lullaby is a propaganda song and any three-year-old knows it ... A hymn is a controversial song - sing one in the wrong church: you'll find out ...

Pete Seeger

#12. Character and intelligence are the poles you talent spins on, displaying your gifts.

Baltasar Gracian

#13. For many of us the march from Selma to Montgomery was about protest and prayer. Legs are not lips and walking is not kneeling. And yet our legs uttered songs. Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

#14. I won't be indulging in anger anymore, vehemently and self-righteously singing protest songs, and expecting them to bring peace to me or anyone else.

Susan Schneider

#15. We can't forget what happened on May 4th, 1970, when four students gave up their lives because they had the American constitutional right of peaceful protest. They gave up their lives. And to sing that song in that spot on that anniversary was very emotional for us.

Graham Nash

#16. I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down,
Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town,
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime,
But is there because he's a victim of the times.
I wear the black for those who never read

Johnny Cash

#17. He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.

Thomas Mann

#18. The journey is suppose to go on until you meet yourself, Lizabeth said. It could be very long.

Erika Tamar