Tom Morello Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

This unprecedented racism, bigotry and proto-fascist agenda that Donald Trump is trying to shove down America's throat has unleashed the resistance that will dethrone him.

The most powerful music is music with purpose.

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

We have power not just with our voices, but we have economic power in what we do for a living, too.

My job is to steel the backbone of people on the frontlines of social justice struggles, and to put wind in sails of those struggles. And people who are fighting on a, on a daily basis, at a grass roots level.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bad presidents make for great music, and I'm gonna do my best to provide it.

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

Trump's ignorance in environmental science is a threat to the entire planet.

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.

Amazingly talented singer who sang like an angry angel

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.

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

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.

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

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.

There's not a country on earth that doesn't feel that it might be invaded by Donald Trump's regime.

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

The reason why many young people in the Vietnam War era were active was their lives were threatened by the draft and they were going to perhaps be forced to go overseas and fight in an immoral war.

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

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.

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

In my own way, I was a rebellious kid.

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

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.

The skin you're in makes choices for you...