Quotes About Politics And Art

#1. My dad and I had a real meeting of the minds. We loved to talk about music, politics, and art. He loved children. The thing I missed most about my dad when he died was that this person who really gets who I am at the core was gone.

Rosanne Cash

#2. Many of the left thinkers that really matter to me - that formed a big part of my thinking about politics and art - emphasize how capitalism is a totality, how there's no escape from it, no outside.

Ben Lerner

#3. Living gives you a better understanding of life. I would hope that my characters have become deeper and more rounded personalities. Wider travels have given me considerably greater insight into how cultural differences affect not only people, but politics and art.

Alan Dean Foster

#4. Rock was different from rock and roll. Rock was virtuosic and adult, as opposed to popsy and teenaged. Rock and roll was apolitical and fun, while rock was "heavy" and often political, creating vistas of psychic energy that carried beyond the music itself and into radical politics and art.

Stephen Davis

#5. Ah, there's a director. Astonishing, Spike Lee. A feisty guy, but a guy who's, I think, incredibly misunderstood. I think people review his politics or his color as opposed to his filmmaking sometimes. Because he's a wonderful, wonderful filmmaker and a lover of the art.

Brian Cox

#6. Politics has always been the art of the possible. Today it's too often the art of the probable - tinkering around the edges without any greater vision, without a sense of optimism and imagination.

John F. Kerry

#7. Without a clear focus on the scandal of wage labor and original accumulation, on capitalism's awful history of possession and dispossession, both art and politics mistake images for the enemy.

Anonymous

#8. An apocryphal story recounts the dilhemma of a man during the Civil War who could not decide whether to join the Confederate or Union forces. Finally he put on a gray coat and blue pants, and both sides shot him.

John Frohnmayer

#9. Surely to root politics out of art is a highly necessary undertaking: for the freedom of art, like that of science, depends entirely upon its objectivity and non-practical, non-partisan passion.

Wyndham Lewis

#10. Then down came the lid
the day was lost, for art, at Sarajevo. World-politics stepped in, and a war was started which has not ended yet: a "war to end war." But it merely ended art. It did not end war.

Wyndham Lewis

#11. All good art is political. Between the lines of every book, the author implants messages for the unsuspecting reader. If not, what point does it serve?

Chloe Thurlow

#12. We can't worry about meaning. Ari proposed to us that meaning is a consumer item. Some people manufacture it through religion, philosophy, nationhood, politics, and some people buy it. But an artist is not a manufacturer.

David Cronenberg

#13. Now and then some one says that the religion of his father and mother is good enough for him, and wonders why anybody should desire a better. Surely we are not bound to follow our parents in religion any more than in politics, science or art.

Robert G. Ingersoll

#14. Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.

Oscar Ameringer

#15. True politics cannot take a single step without first paying homage to morals, and while politics itself is a difficult art, its combination with morals is no art at all; for morals cuts the Gordian knot which politics cannot solve as soon as the two are in conflict.

Immanuel Kant

#16. The more I study the things of the mind the more mathematical I find them. In them as in mathematics it is a question of quantities; they must be treated with precision. I have never had more satisfaction than in proving this in the realms of art, politics and history.

Hippolyte Taine

#17. The White House usually followed the seagull theory of management: fly in, squawk and flap and shit, and fly away.

John Frohnmayer

#18. Often we had no choice: we couldn't reform the whole world. And didn't somebody once say 'Politics is the art of the possible'?" "Quite true - which is why only second-rate minds go into it. Genius likes to challenge the impossible.

Arthur C. Clarke

#19. I met my wife Anne who was a sociology student, and her influence together with activities associated with the student movement of the time opened up my interests amongst other things into the theatre, art, music, politics and philosophy.

Paul Nurse

#20. If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.

Yann Martel

#21. Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, or the arts are clearly of an atrabilious temperament and some of them to such an extent as to be affected by diseases caused by black bile?

Aristotle.

#22. If people really stopped and realized how much art and creative people move the world versus politics and religion, I mean it's not even up for debate. An artist at least creates things, puts things into the world. Where as these other people are destroying things, taking things out of the world.

Marilyn Manson

#23. There arose a belief in style - and in banality. Banality encompassed politics, too, because it was a common belief that politics were not worthy of art.

Douglas Sirk

#24. Harold March was the sort of man who knows everything about politics, and nothing about politicians. He also knew a great deal about art, letters, philosophy, and general culture; about almost everything, indeed, except the world he was living in.

G.K. Chesterton

#25. Politics is an art and not a science, and what is required for its mastery is not the rationality of the engineer but the wisdom and the moral strength of the statesman

Hans J. Morgenthau

#26. Politics in America has become a Jewish profession, just like arts and the law ...

Ira Forman

#27. Folk art has never been much about politics; it's about action and utility.

Cass McCombs

#28. Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#29. I define "politics" as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create - not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions.

Adrienne Rich

#30. As an artist, I'm really inspired by everything around me - from travel and art, to friends and family, social voices in media and politics. I get a lot of inspiration from daily life.

Cara Santana

#31. As I got older I became a kind of sub cultural junkie, foraging around in music, street fashion and eventually art, politics and the freakier reaches of the Internet, hunting the next discovery, the next seam of underground gold.

Hari Kunzru

#32. What is music in America? It's this stand-in for political action in a lot of senses. We have no democracy and we have no art culture, and we've long considered politics nebbish-y and hopelessly unsexy. So a lot of what would be considered political activism is channeled into cultural work.

Ian Svenonius

#33. Abandoned by philosophy, politics, and sociology, historical determinism continues to hold out in formalist art criticism.

Harold Rosenberg

#34. I'm an unabashed elitist. Everyone needs a good editor, and there is peril in worshiping amateurism and the unedited in science, art, and journalism.

K. Lee Lerner

#35. In all sorts of markets - music, film, art, and politics - the future of popularity will be harder to predict as the broadcast power of radio and television democratizes and the channels of exposure grow.... The gatekeepers had their day. Now there are simply too many gates to keep.

Derek Thompson

#36. The art of politics is to be ahead of your time
about six months will do it. Any more than that, and people forget you were there.

Gloria Steinem

#37. I got my first camera when I was 21 - my boyfriend gave it to me for my birthday - but at that point politics was my life, and I viewed the camera as a tool for expressing my political beliefs rather than as an art medium.

Carrie Mae Weems

#38. No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages, and arts, of his times shall have no share.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#39. A standard line, promoted by people like Clement Greenberg, is that politics contaminates art, and Manet is often cited as an example of art for art's sake.

Hans Haacke

#40. Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.

E.L. Doctorow

#41. I've gone to work, I've raised a child, and I've spent 30 years trying to better the lives of children and families. But I often return to one thing I said way back then - that politics is the art of making possible what appears to be impossible.

Hillary Clinton

#42. Art is like politics. Any theory carried too far ends in sterility, and freshness is only gained by following some other line.

Amy Lowell

#43. Art and politics have many things in common.

Tania Bruguera

#44. Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.

Groucho Marx

#45. Political events are part of everyday life [in Colombia], so art and politics came to me as a natural thing, something that has been very much present in my life from the start.

Doris Salcedo

#46. Broadly put, philosophers think: politicians maneuver. Jefferson's genius was that he was both and could do both, often simultaneously. Such is the art of power.

Jon Meacham

#47. Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics is not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do.

Aldous Huxley

#48. Art, freedom and creativity will change society faster than politics.

Victor Pinchuk

#49. All the genres of philosophy, science, high art, athletics and politics were invented by men. But by the Promethean law of conflict and capture, woman has a right to seize what she will and vie with man on her own terms.

Camille Paglia

#50. In art, religion, and politics the respect must be mutual, no matter how violent the disagreement.

Vincent Price

#51. To me this is the first principle of life, the foundational principle, and a lesson you can't learn at the foot of any wise man: Get up! The art of living is simply getting up after you've been knocked down.

Joe Biden

#52. I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

Henry Adams

#53. I don't believe that art and politics or social issues must be separated. In writing about marriage, for example, money can be a big factor, and money is linked to earning, and earning is influenced by politics.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#54. I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain ending - an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check, and nihilism at bay.

William Kentridge

#55. All the arts, music, the visual arts, acting and dancing arts, cooking arts, and I believe sports, will save the human race because they can leap over barriers, religions, leap over barriers of race, politics.

Pete Seeger

#56. Politics is the art of achieving political goals - of achieving what is possible in a given situation - that is, in a situation that has its conditions and its limits.

Adam Michnik

#57. If newspapers were written by people whose sole object in writing was to tell the truth about politics and the truth about art we should not believe in war, and we should believe in art.

Virginia Woolf

#58. Art has often been and continues to be considered transcendent. I see this as misguided and, in fact, a way of subverting the powerful voice art can be in global discussions about politics, economics, society, culture, religion and international relations.

Aman Mojadidi

#59. If my fellow Americans could adopt even a fraction of the French attitude about food and life (don't worry, you don't have to sign on to the politics, too), managing weight would cease to be a terror, an obsession, and reveal its true nature as part of the art of living.

Mireille Guiliano

#60. To be a writer and political is a dangerous thing. To be a writer and apolitical is even more dangerous. Art is right, left; in truth, it has only one direction and that is forward.

Chris Campanioni

#61. Politics are nothing but sand and gravel: it is art and life that feed us until we die. Everything else is ambition, hysteria or hatred.

Louise Bogan

#62. Politics is the art of acquiring, holding, and wielding power.

Indira Gandhi

#63. Label celebrity a consumer society's most precious consumer product, and eventually it becomes the hero with a thousand faces, the packaging of the society's art and politics, the framework of its commerce, and the stuff of its religion.

Lewis H. Lapham

#64. The bulk of mankind believe in two gods. They are under one dominion here in the house, as friend and parent, in social circles, in letters, in art, in love, in religion; but in mechanics, in dealing with steam and climate, in trade, in politics, they think they come under another.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#65. Let's be happy and forget all about art and politics!

Marty Rubin

#66. It is probably true that business corrupts everything it touches. It corrupts politics, sports, literature, art, labor unions and so on. But business also corrupts and undermines monolithic totalitarianism. Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncapitalist environment.

Eric Hoffer

#67. Rather than comparing [war] to art we could more accurately compare it to commerce, which is also a conflict of human interests and activities; and it is still closer to politics, which in turn may be considered as a kind of commerce on a larger scale.

Carl Von Clausewitz

#68. 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

#69. Politics: the art of appearing candid and completely open while concealing as much as possible.

Frank Herbert

#70. Any army which does not train to use all the weapons, all the means and methods of warfare that the enemy possesses, or may possess, is behaving in an unwise or even criminal manner. This applies to politics even more than it does to the art of war.

Vladimir Lenin

#71. Isadore [Duncan], who had an un-American genius for art, for organizing love, maternity, politics and pedagogy on a great personal scale, had also an un-American genius for grandeur.

Janet Flanner

#72. At a time when politics deals in distortions and half truths, truth is to be found in the liberal arts. There's something afoot in this country and you are very much a part of it.

Joyce Carol Oates

#73. Which, in morals, leads away from superstition, Which, in politics, leads away from government, and Which, in art, leads away from Tradition.

Various

#74. The idea is that human culture as broadly defined
art, politics, technology, religion, and so on
evolves in much the way biological species evolve: new cultural traits arise and may flourish or perish, and as a result whole institutions can belief systems form and change.

Robert Wright

#75. There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Mao Zedong

#76. The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution!

Albert Einstein

#77. I think if you say that art and politics, or religion and politics, mustn't mix, don't mix, that is itself a political statement. Even if you are writing a 19th-century novel where the money comes from a plantation in the Caribbean and you don't talk about that, that itself is a political thing.

Mohsin Hamid

#78. During my training I was trained in Psycho-politics. This was the art of capturing the minds of a nation through brainwashing and fake mental health.

Kenneth Goff

#79. I avoid contemporary TV ... politics ... art: all too frantic, fevered, and frivolous, or else angry, bitter.

Dean Koontz

#80. The French have a penchant for absolutism, for thinking that things are all one way or all another, which is why their politics are marked by a general inability to compromise and why they tend to hold their personal opinions until the bitter end, even after they have clearly lost an argument.

Mark Zero

#81. Revolutionary politics, revolutionary art, and oh, the revolutionary mind, is the dullest thing on earth ... What a stupid word! What a stale fuss!

Wyndham Lewis

#82. Due to the failure of politics, which has become a process of middle-management, art has become one of the last open spaces to question core beliefs and to design a viable future. Art becomes an open space where we can ask fundamental questions about ourselves.

Antony Gormley

#83. Though some may think there should be a separation between art/music and politics, it should be reinforced that art can be a form of nonviolent protest.

Eddie Vedder

#84. For the amoral herd that fears boredom above all else, everything becomes entertainment. Sex and sport, politics and the arts are transformed into entertainment ... Nothing is immune from the demand that boredom be relieved (but without personal involvement, for mass society is a spectator society).

Merold Westphal

#85. The art of politics is learning to walk with your back to the wall, your elbows high, and a smile on your face. It's a survival game played under the glare of lights.

Jean Chretien

#86. The differences between revolution in art and revolution in politics are enormous. Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead.

Harold Rosenberg

#87. I was always seeking truth from childhood. And I identified truth with many things, with science, with politics, with art, and I kept coming back to the thought that without God I can't get to what I'm looking for.

Goswami Kriyananda

#88. Politics, when it is an art and a service, not an exploitation, is about acting for an ideal through realities.

Charles De Gaulle

#89. Take the time to discover how African-Americans have had a great impact on this country. In science, education, literature, art, and politics.

Lynn Swann

#90. Politics is the art of promising heaven and delivering purgatory, and claiming hero status for saving your country from hell.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

#91. Politics is the art of achieving prestige and power without merit.

P. J. O'Rourke

#92. Truth and politics do not and cannot mix because politics is the art of saying only what needs to be said - and saying it in just the right way - in order to achieve a desired end.

Neale Donald Walsch

#93. The conflict between art and politics ... cannot and must not be solved.

Hannah Arendt

#94. There's an axiom I live by: 'There is no art without politics.' You either choose to engage it, or you choose political apathy. This ties in with ideas around real-time performance and feedback.

Chris Jordan

#95. Life is politics, basically, but you don't just go to a gallery and put the words 'art' and 'politics' on the wall.

Luc Tuymans

#96. The two most potent post-war orthodoxies
socialist politics and modernist art
have at least one feature in common: they are bothforms of snobbery, the anti-bourgeois snobbery of people convinced of their right to dictate to the common man in the name of the common man.

Roger Scruton

#97. Own what you are, and I mean whether that's art, or whether that's fashion, or whether that's music, or whether that's acting, or whether that's politics, or whether that's literature; it's own what you are, and grab it, and, you know, be as prolific as possible.

Courtney Love

#98. You must survive with grace. You must do so gallantly. How archaic these terms seem to us in our modern world. There is little grace or gallantry in commerce or politics and not much in art.

Chris Cooper

#99. When you examine the genesis of great works of art, successful start-ups, and revolutionary shifts in politics, you can always trace back a history of monetary and nonmonetary exchange, the hidden patrons and underlying favors.

Amanda Palmer

#100. Wars, for us, are either inevitable, or created. Whatever they are, they should not wholly vitiate art. What art needs is greater men, and what politics needs is better men.
(Something About a Soldier (1940))

William, Saroyan