War Music Quotes

#1. Today we are in a war against war - music is our power.

Michael Franti

#2. Most music culture these days runs on systems and networks devised to deal with the aftermath of thermonuclear war. Music culture has a habit of using these moods and machines in creative, unintended ways.

Kode9

#3. You know, the thing that struck me about Civil War music was how bloody it was; it was full of hatred. There was incredible vitriol in it.

T Bone Burnett

#4. In World War II all these countries were completely against each other, complete opposite. Now we're getting them all together, through the idea of music.

Jimi Hendrix

#5. The sort of commercial parameters of classical music changed after the [World War II] , and the whole industry became more backward-looking.

Esa-Pekka Salonen

#6. music came before anything else, before language and large-scale war and liquid soap, and because music is the one giant thing America has done right, amid all it has done wrong. Music, that ancient and incorruptible bitch.

Steve Almond

#7. I took a trip in 2004, a year after the war started in Iraq. I played music on the streets of Baghdad for Iraqi civilians. I'd also play for U.S. soldiers at night when they were off duty in the bars. Then I would talk to people, and I would film them and ask them about their life and the conflict.

Michael Franti

#8. Why isn't it hip-hop when I do it? Everybody else can have beef within the music, talk about differences and it's ok. It's music, it's hip-hop, it's ground breaking. When I do it, it's war.

Tupac Shakur

#9. The '60s are my favorite decade - with the Cold War, the women's movement. And then there's the music, the fashion, the clothes, the hair.

Margot Robbie

#10. Whenever humans come together for any reason, music is there: weddings, funerals, graduation from college, men marching off to war, stadium sporting events, a night on the town, prayer, a romantic dinner, mothers rocking their infants to sleep ... music is a part of the fabric of everyday life.

Daniel Levitin

#11. Capoeira is a game, it is dance, it is fight, it is of war and it is of peace, it is of culture, of music, it is a portion of things.

Reinaldo Ramos Suassuna

#12. Righteous, I like that. Kinda fitting when you think about it. If we danced and shared music, we'd be too busy en-joy-in' life to start a war.

E.A. Bucchianeri

#13. The chanting went on, the musicians giving in to the rhythm of their own being, finding healing in touching that rhythm, and healing in chanting about death, the only real god they knew.

Karl Marlantes

#14. I got one foot in the golden life, one foot in the gutter. So close to the other side, so far from the wonder. I got one foot in the golden life, one foot in the gutter. So sick of the tug of war, that keeps pulling me under

5 Seconds Of Summer

#15. After every war, there was a significant change in the music, and I can understand how that happened. If you participate in protecting the country, you think you can be part of it, but you come back home and it's worse than ever.

Quincy Jones

#16. If he'd been making shell-cases during the war it might have been better for music.

Maurice Ravel

#17. I actually write film music because I'm classically trained on the piano so as well as songwriting I also write actual film music that could be used for movies like war movies and love movies.

Vanessa Brown

#18. Perhaps he simply assumed: a bitterness of habit, of boy after boy trained for music and medicine, and unleashed for murder.

Madeline Miller

#19. If peace only had the music and pageantry of war, there'd be no wars.

Sophie Kerr

#20. The first thing I learned was the 'St Louis Blues' when I was eight. Both my grandmothers, my mother and uncle played the piano. This was post-war Britain, and they played boogie woogie and blues, which was the underground music of the time.

Jools Holland

#21. I don't know if music has ever achieved anything past appealing to the people that it appeals to. If a song could stop a war, then Bob Marley and Bob Dylan songs would have stopped one or two.

Henry Rollins

#22. No music is going to stop the war. What's going to stop the war is a large amount of body bags, or a large amount of people in the streets, protesting it before it starts.

Eddie Vedder

#23. The opposite of war isn't peace, it's creation.

Jonathan Larson

#24. I don't support terrorism and never have. As a Sri Lankan that fled war and bombings, my music is the voice of the civilian refugee.

M.I.A.

#25. You can say battle or war or whatever, but in the end, it's music. It's not really violent in intent at all, it's really just about expression and celebrating that in itself.

Eric San

#26. While all the pomp and circumstance of war animated others, it only saddened me; and all of past reflection, all of future dread, made the whole grandeur of the martial scene, and all the delusive seduction of martial music, fill my eyes frequently with tears ...

Fanny Burney

#27. Music wasn't about learning how to love. It was about learning what to disown and when to disown it. Even the most magnificent piece would end up as collateral damage in the endless war over taste.

Richard Powers

#28. We must see that peace represents a sweeter music, a cosmic melody, that is far superior to the discords of war.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#29. Classic music somehow changed, and it changed between the first and the second world wars, and somehow what happened was that the hero that had been the composer, the hero now was the performer, and especially the conductor.

Esa-Pekka Salonen

#30. There are many ties that bind, and as many walls that divide. Music and madness. Love and unending time. Race and war. Strum weaves together each element into a larger human tapestry of light and shadow, where a combination of fate and decision can define a family's legacy.

Nancy Young

#31. Since I'm allergic to various things, the army wouldn't accept me during the war, and I got into the Office of War Information, which sent music to Europe.

Elliott Carter

#32. Music is the weapon in the war against unhappiness.

Jason Mraz

#33. In times of war, starvation, hunger and injustice, such tragedy can only be put aside if you allow yourself to be uplifted through music, film and dance.

Emmanuel Jal

#34. War and Niagara thunder to a music of their own.

Wendell Phillips

#35. Playing music in the wake of the Blink thing was like finding love in the middle of a war zone.

Tom DeLonge

#36. Missandei said the Peaceful People made music instead of war. They did not kill, not even animals; they ate only fruit and never flesh.

George R R Martin

#37. I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.

Kenneth Koch

#38. In 1945 music had a serious purpose; to defy post war depression & revitalize the romantic & hopeful aspirations of an exhausted ppl.

Pete Townshend

#39. He said I'm gonna buy a gun and start a war, if you can tell me something worth fighting for. Oh and I'm gonna buy this place, that's what I said.
Blame it upon a rush of blood to the head

Chris Martin

#40. Leaders can change the tenor of the workplace and create harmony in motion toward a favorable result. So every time you say to your team, "Let's rock and roll," make sure you have already set up the stage to where they can actually perform like rock stars.

Thomas Huynh

#41. In World War II, jazz absolutely was the music of freedom, and then in the Cold War, behind the Iron Curtain, same thing. It was all underground, but they needed the food of freedom that jazz offered.

Herbie Hancock

#42. Playing on the streets of Iraq, or in Israel or the Gaza strip, I'd sing angry protest songs against war. People would say, 'Make us clap, make us dance, and laugh and sing.' It really made me think about the importance of happy music.

Michael Franti

#43. Too bad people can't always be playing music, maybe then there wouldn't be any more wars.

Margot Benary-Isbert

#44. His men had begun gathering the wounded or stunned into a small group some distance back up the slope. Here and there an animal or human stirred, but not many. There were few cries of pain or fear now. Mostly, it was eerily quiet. Even the insects had ceased their music.

Derek Donais

#45. no one has ever gone to war over music.

David Byrne

#46. You can imagine several scenes from Star Wars? The way they looked? For me, that's how music is. Sometimes I'll be developing riffs for songs, just while I'm sitting around and not playing.

Ryan Adams

#47. You've got the Wall Street situation, the sub-prime situation. You've got a black president. We've got wars. We've got unemployment. But the music doesn't reflect that. And I challenge anybody to show me a music that's on the radio that reflects that.

Ice-T

#48. I knew I wanted to write on religious themes when I was a GI in World War II. I saw and experienced so much violence that I thought I could express my outrage best with music.

Dave Brubeck

#49. It's funny, isn't it," Miss Woolf whispered in Ursula's ear, "how much German music we listen to. Great beauty transcends all. Perhaps after the war it will heal all too.

Kate Atkinson

#50. Truth has a resonance to it that fills the cracks where falsehoods lie.

Rick DeStefanis

#51. Telescopes and bathyscapes and sonar probes of Scottish lakes, Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse explained with abstract phase-space maps, some x-ray slides, a music score, Minard's Napoleonic war: the most exciting new frontier is charting what's already here.

Randall Munroe

#52. Daddy, I don't like military parades. I never want to be like those people who march rank and file to music - they were given brains by mistake.

Corinne Maier

#53. How good music and bad reasons sound when one marches against an enemy.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#54. When I listen to music from different eras, I sense different things. The 1940s music, there's so much optimism and romance, maybe because they just solved the biggest problem on Earth at that time - World War II. In the 1960s, there was so much creativity and innovation in sound.

Eric Betzig

#55. When music and courtesy are better understood and appreciated, there will be no war.

Confucius

#56. The advent of electronically synthesized sound after World War II has unquestionably had enormous influence on music in general.

George Crumb

#57. No matter what is happening in life or in the world - war, natural disaster, poor health, pain, the death of loved ones - if existence is filled with art, music and literature, life will be fulfilling, a joy.

Karen DeCrow

#58. Me and my father went through a war period where we wasn't talking. He wanted me to go to theology school - I didn't want to go. I wanted to do music. I told him I was a minister through music.

Wyclef Jean

#59. Einstein was attending a music salon in Germany before the second world war, with the violinist S. Suzuki. Two Japanese women played a German piece of music and a woman in the audience exclaimed: "How wonderful! It sounds so German!" Einstein responded: "Madam, people are all the same."

Albert Einstein

#60. The music at a wedding procession always reminds me of the music of soldiers going into battle.

Heinrich Heine

#61. There's no similarity between football and ballet, so this ain't ballet music being played on the field. I'm pumping something that's going to put me in a frame of mind to go to war, and something that's very high tempo and high beat.

Cam Newton

#62. My entire life has really revolved around music that was written about the time that I was born, 1908, to just before the First World War and shortly after it. This music I've always known, and it is that music that's most important to me.

Elliott Carter

#63. The United States finds itself with forces of reaction. Do I have to demonstrate this? The Taliban's annihilation of music and culture? The enslavement of women?

Christopher Hitchens

#64. Precious souls are at high stakes when this world turns over with feet that quake. The timeless hearts of souls that make, beautiful music at no mistake. Peace love and light too all who demand, and together forever in on this earth we we will stand.

Peace Gypsy

#65. Well, all's fair in love, war and fooling the critics.

Victor Borge

#66. Music plays a huge role in the movie. The music in Star Wars, I can't imagine what the movie would have been like without it. It made the film.

Joshua Bell

#67. I have to study politics and war so that my sons can study mathematics, commerce and agriculture, so their sons can study poetry, painting and music.

John Quincy Adams

#68. If feels good to live after death. It feels good to not be dead. It feels so good to find myself alive and flying home. The music plays in my ears and I float further and further away from war. Fucking Baghdad.

Michael Hastings

#69. I am one of the best five writers to come out of English music since the war.

Roger Waters

#70. Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.

Clive James