Tom Morello Quotations

Music, I think, is best when it honestly explores personal demons, and it stirs around in the silt of the psyche to find out what's really there.

Then about 12 years ago it dawned on me that folk music - the music of Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs, early Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Pete Seeger - could be as heavy as anything that comes through a Marshall stack. The combination of three chords and the right lyrical couplet can be as heavy as anything in the Metallica catalogue.

The real estate agent had to go door-to-door in the apartment building we wanted to rent, asking if it was OK for this interracial family - my mom is white and I was a 1-year-old half-African kid - to live in the apartment building.

The way corporate media likes to portray America is as a homogenous whole that high-five's each other at the Super Bowl. But what we have is a grotesque disparity between the rich and poor that is only getting wider.

I was a fan of heavy music - first metal, then punk, then hip hop.

My parents met in Kenya. My father is African, is Kenyan. The Kenyan side of my family was involved in the anti-colonial movement.

We've been able to have our cake and eat it, too. Every song, every T-shirt, is absolutely a pure expression of what we want to do. And it connects.

I literally integrated the small town of Libertyville, Illinois. I was the first person of color to reside within its borders.

I didn't grow up with my Kenyan family. I grew up in a small, conservative suburb of Chicago.

I came late to the genre of folk music.

Music is not some stuffy college lecture, ... On a good day, Rage Against the Machine is not able to just rock you like a hurricane, but also to fuel the engine with indignation and the band's activist convictions.

We've done smaller tours at the beginning of records, we've done Lollapalooza , but this is our first real official AUDIOSLAVE tour.

We were all against the war from the very beginning. But now, I think you're seeing more and more that Middle America is turning against the war for reasons that are described in this video. The real human cost, the human tally of this awful war is shown in a very subtle, very real and very humanistic way. That's why it has such a great weight to it, because it personalizes this tragedy that's happening halfway around the world.

We were all against the war from the very beginning, ... But now, I think you're seeing more and more that Middle America is turning against the war for reasons that are described in this video. The real human cost, the human tally of this awful war is shown in a very subtle, very real and very humanistic way. That's why it has such a great weight to it, because it personalizes this tragedy that's happening halfway around the world.

We offer a stark contrast to the bland escapism that chokes the charts,

We were playing some RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE and SOUNDGARDEN songs in the past, but we'll probably be playing a wider variety of those this time out. Between RAGE , SOUNDGARDEN and TEMPLE OF THE DOG , there's 11 or 12 records of our own that we could draw from, so it's pretty exciting.

We're very involved in picking the bands. KASABIAN is great. I know less about SEETHER , but I hear they rock.

The video tells a very simple story and a very real story. It's a story of a woman who loses her husband and a child who loses his father. That's the simple story. The bigger picture is that the culture of violence at home breeds a culture of violence abroad, and there's a price to be paid for that. And that price is the loss of lives and families destroyed and to sum that up in a three-and-a-half-minute video is something that was pretty incredible.

It's a venue where you can really feel the history. You know, it was one of my first pilgrimages. I went on a rock tour just to go there and check it out.

It was a terrible natural disaster but an even greater human catastrophe.

It's not like we just changed a rapper for a singer, ... We happen to have one of the greatest rock singers of all time.

I know less about SEETHER, but I hear they rock.

And I think that on this record, we've accomplished the mission we set out at the beginning of the first rehearsals. And that was, not to just make the best Rage Against the Machine record, but to make the best Rage record by a wide margin. We've made the heaviest record to date and it's our funkiest record to date.

A musician's or artist's responsibility is a simple one, and that is, through your music to tell the truth,

Bashing the elite is what I'm all about in my music because they absolutely don't deserve the privileged position that they're in, and we're seeing this around the globe right now.

I think that new artistic challenges help you grow both as a person, as an artist, and then they feed back into your other work, and tend to magnify it.

I'd say that one area where my political views have remained unchanged is that, I am opposed to the government spying on everybody.

I think you might be considered a terrorist for asking the question! It can be so broadly defined now. And the thing is, you're not privy to those decisions. Anyone who expresses any opinion can be considered a terrorist.

If you want to change the world right now, it's not so much a secret how you do it. You put the secrets of a criminal government on the Internet.

What is poverty, if not violence. Like, the number of people who die every year from starvation and from hunger and poverty is in the tens of millions.

Poverty is curable, but it's just not done, because it's not profitable. And that is the kind of violence that's perpetuated on humanity.

When real substantive change happens it's the people who watch your show, they're the ones that make it happen. It's people whose names are not highlighted in history books. They're the ones that stand up in their place and time to make change.

I feel fortunate to have made records during an era where people actually bought music. But I have friends in struggling up-and-coming bands that will certainly never be able to pay the rent, because music has been devalued.

Amazingly talented singer who sang like an angry angel

In a world of bands called Limp Bizkit and Hoobastank, Electric Sheep rolls off the tongue like a Shakespearean love sonnet. Leave me alone.

The skin you're in makes choices for you.

The problem is not cop killers...it's killer cops.

What draws people to the instrument is the love for guitar players that play a certain way. I mean, even though it wasn't intentional, it was hard to avoid copying Eddie Van Halen. He was basically the *bleep* back then.

Tonight, it's the rock and roll all night and party every day hall of fame

For the millennium [New Year's Eve], you really have a choice to make. You either have to be naked with your head on fire and a shotgun in Bali or else you have to spend time with friends or family around the fireplace. And I'm choosing option B

I've always been on a personal mission to save the guitar.

Being a musician is a given for me-I didn't have much choice in the matter.

Always question the authority.

Well, I don't care for Paul Ryan's sound or his lyrics. He can like whatever bands he wants, but his guiding vision of shifting revenue more radically to the one percent is antithetical to the message of Rage.

I find it ironic that now water is more expensive than music. On the one hand, record companies can't go crying when they've gouged consumers for decades, charging exorbitant prices for CDs that cost 29 cents to make. On the other hand, when music is free, musicians starve.

I myself am a very, very peaceful person. Throughout our history, from our own American revolution to the resistance against apartheid in South Africa, to labor strikes in the US, people have resorted to violence to achieve a more progressive society, from time to time.

You can kiss my Kiss-loving ass because Kiss was never a critic's band. It was a people's band.

Whenever I set out in a new direction, whether it's with a new band or being a frontman or writing a comic book or entering into movie scoring or anything like that, I wouldn't say that I do it fearlessly.

Things like rebellion and resistance to authority are absolutely as much a part of the human experience as love and cars are, and it's a part that doesn't get covered very much in pop music.

There are many fans of hard rock music that have been wrongly pigeonholed as apathetic. This music is not music for the elitist coffeehouse culture in SoHo. It' s rock 'n' roll music for kids across the land, and I think that makes it much more subversive in a way, in that it has the form and the function of a powerful, populist music, but it can carry very incendiary messages.

Of course, music is an art form, and it's not all that competitive. But we don't ever intend to be the second-best band on a stage at any show.

The most powerful music is music with purpose.

In our country there's never been a successful progressive struggle that did not have a soundtrack, whether it was the civil rights movement, workers' rights movement, women's rights movement. There's got to be songs at the barricades, and those are the kinds of songs that I try to write.

There are literally billions of people on the planet who live in an unimaginable poverty that's not in any way different from the plight of the people in Orchid. And you can't have the splendor of Rodeo Drive without the sweatshops of Indonesia; those two things go hand in hand.

In my own way, I was a rebellious kid.

Sacrifice and neon lights slave ships don't wait. Love many, trust few, and don't be late

I don't want to leave this mess around my children to clean up. I want to swing absolutely as hard as I can to straighten things out before they get to the age where it starts hurting them.

I have another name for what they're terming whistleblowers, and that's righteous heroes. From Bradley Manning to Snowden. They're people of conscience who are unwilling to turn a blind eye to the crimes of our government. And thank goodness for them.

I think it's crucially important to be present in the lives of your children. They are my most important cause that I fight for. But I also feel an added responsibility that I want to leave them a better world than this one that we have now.

Music and the arts feed our souls, but a decent wage puts food on the table. Musicians, fans of music, and grassroots political organizations are a potent force to fight for social justice.

There's a lot of injustice in the world and it's what I sing about in my music and what I try to confront in my life as an activist.

When you wanna rock hard, children, lean on F#.

Charles Manson loved the Beatles but didn’t understand them. Governor Chris Christie loves Bruce Springsteen but doesn’t understand him. And Paul Ryan is clueless about his favorite band, Rage Against the Machine.

If aliens came down and challenged us to a Battle of the Bands to decide the fate of Planet Earth, I would feel very confident putting early Van Halen forward as our champion.

My music is made for the people who are willing to stand up to change this world themselves.

A musicians or artists responsibility is a simple one, and that is, through your music to tell the truth.

America touts itself as the land of the free, but the number one freedom that you and I have is the freedom to enter into a subservient role in the workplace. Once you exercise this freedom you’ve lost all control over what you do, what is produced, and how it is produced. And in the end, the product doesn’t belong to you. The only way you can avoid bosses and jobs is if you don’t care about making a living. Which leads to the second freedom: the freedom to starve.

A good song should make you wanna tap your foot and get with your girl. A great song should destroy cops and set fire to the suburbs. I'm only interested in writing great songs.

Paul Ryan's love for Rage Against The Machine is amusing, because he is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades