Serj Tankian Quotes

Sometimes it's better to have a benign dictator than a dumb democracy, to be honest.

We first fought... in the name of religion, then Communism, and now in the name of drugs and terrorism. Our excuses for global domination always change.

I think music has the ability to inspire people and to change hearts, and the heart has the power to change the mind, and the mind has the power to change the world.

The living ideas of the dead are more powerful and effective than the dead ideas of the living.

I believe very firmly that indigenous populations had a really good, intuitive understanding of why we're here. And we're trying to gain that same understanding through psychology and intellect in modern civilization.

Life is that perfect fine line between ironies.

Pretending that we live doesn't make us alive.

I've always thought of the sky as, like, an open canvas. When I was a kid and I looked at the sky, I always remember being able to daydream, just looking at the sky, being creative, being able to design things. What would happen if we had no sky? Where would we be? Well, obviously, scientifically, without an atmosphere, we'd all be dead.

Civilization is a failure. We need to think what we can do together in love and peace.

Science fails to recognize the single most potent element of human existence...faith.

Awareness in our society has flipped all types of injustice on its head.

We have the power to change our lives, and the world around us.

The most important thing about music that I've learned after all this time is that to me, it's a way of reaching the truth.

Anti-depressan ts Controlling tools of your system Making life more tolerable Making life more tolerable

Sometimes a good love song can change the world and create positive energy more than any political song can.

I'm not comfortable with just entertaining. Although I like entertaining, I also like bringing forward the truth of our times as minstrels used to in the old days.

I think every artist should follow their vision, their hearts is what they need to reveal, not something that society is looking out for.

I think that because of YouTube, because of MySpace, because of the digital domain that we have on the Internet, the younger generation is much more open to information. I think it's so much easier for them to gain information and trade information, and they have become more aware. In some cases, more aware than their own parents and adults, as to what's going on in the world. I find that really intriguing and interesting, and I think there is a brewing of a whole new generation of activists coming.

If you allow for a purely capitalistic society, without any type of regulation at all, you will get one monopoly that will eat all of the smaller fish and own everything, and then you'll have zero capitalism, zero competition - it would just be one giant company.

I'd rather let the music speak for itself.

To deny a genocide because of convenience and expediency having to do with an illegal war or occupation in Iraq to me, is double hypocritical.

I've always worked on all different types of music, some with specific project goals and deadlines and some not. Sometimes I would write a piece of music that is almost like a film score or weird electro pieces, wherever the muse took me, and I still do that.

When I was younger, I was listening to a lot of Armenian music, you know, revolutionary music about freedom and protest. In the 70s I was listening to soul and the Bee Gees and ABBA, and funk.

I've worked with some great orchestras and amazing classical musicians, but I don't like the conceptualization of classical music as an elitist form of art.

We [americans] self-regulate ourselves, we self-censor ourselves a lot in this country instead of having someone else censor us so we can blame them. That's not good, either.

Touring and putting out records is fun and cool, but I've been doing it for a long time.

We are the cause of a world that's gone wrong. Nature will survive us, we've been wrong after all. We are the cause of a world that's gone wrong. Wouldn't it be great to heal the world with only a song?

I've got my own studio, and I've got four- to five-hundred unreleased tracks. I've got stuff that's electronic, orchestral, jazz, I've got rock, I've got metal, you know, I don't have polka.

With most of the songs and music that I've composed, irrespective of the myriad videos made, I was always careful not to overly define the experience, leaving room for people to internalize things for themselves, making their experience more integral.

Day is just a collection of hours.

You can say a lot more with a poem than you can with a song, but with a song you can really be more powerful with it. You can express it a lot more powerfully.

Composing is what I love most from what I do. Each genre has a unique expression that you cannot supplant with another. All the records co-inspire each other though they are not tied conceptually in any way to another.

What does civilization mean to you, and what would its ending bring to the world?

People always ask me 'do you think there should be more bands doing political music?' and I say 'absolutely not.'

People think our music's very aggressive or angry or whatever, and it's just the opposite, really... I like laughing. And I like being really calm before a show, and smiley.

It's important for all people, and not just people in bands, to speak out on social justice issues. That means journalists or plumbers have just as much of a responsibility to do that as artists.

It's probably a combination of personal and non-personal matters that have led us to where we are musically.

Making two possibilities a reality. Predicting the future of things we all know. Fighting off the diseased programming Of centuries, centuries, centuries, centuries. Science fails to recognise the single most Potent element of human existence. Letting the reigns go to the unfoldings faith, Science has failed our world. Science has failed our mother earth.

As an artist, you never want to write the same song again, you always want to challenge yourself to writing in a different way.

The percentage of Americans in the prison system, has doubled since 1985.

I think that the memory of Armenia's genocide opened my eyes at an early age to the existence of political cynicism.

The next song I wrote in Paris years ago in a dream. So I didn't really write it, the universe wrote it. And that's what I believe about music, I believe it belongs to the universe, it comes from there and it's this beautiful energy that we share that transcends normal flash existence and that we inspire each other through.

I think as consumers Europeans are a lot more artist loyal irrespective of the genre of music or the type of project or the collaborative effort, and Americans are more media-loyal, because they need to be fed that media to know what's going on, because we're so inundated with promotion and marketing and everything that's going on - advertising.

We're addicted to this concept of civilization - we can't imagine living outside of it because we've had it for 10,000 years, all of what we call history. But according to archaeologists, humanity has been on this planet for millions of years in indigenous form.

I don't want to spend all my time working as an activist. I don't get satisfaction out of it. I'd rather be doing something else. I'm a musician.

I think nobody wants to hear a sermon. Well, some people do, but maybe not through music or not with me. No one wants to hear me give a speech that way.

The best way to do that is to pick up a new instrument or an instrument that you don't typically write on and see where it takes you. Whether it's using an acoustic guitar, or piano, or electronics as tools, all of these lead to creating different types of songs and I used all of these methods for this record.

Political statements are usually more direct, and it works with the upbeat music as well, for some reason, the directness of your statements.

My two interests are spirituality and politics. I would mesh them in some way; maybe try to figure out the politics of spirituality, or the spirituality of politics. Or maybe come up with this really crazy naive solution for the end of civilization.

I hate injustice, and I can't help but speak against it. But I don't want to get involved in politics.