System Of A Down Quotes
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The living ideas of the dead are more powerful and effective than the dead ideas of the living.
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Politicians use religion, and they get their troops riled up with religion.
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I think that the memory of Armenia's genocide opened my eyes at an early age to the existence of political cynicism.
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Basically I write songs, and I need for there to be a home for these songs.
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Corporatization is the descendant of industrialization.
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My personal relationship with music is an imperfect harmony because I never studied music, but here I am not just writing for bands but full orchestral sections and doing all this composition, and I never learned the right way of doing things so I have a lot of dissonant sounds and things that are brought to my attention, and generally I leave them that way because I like those imperfections.
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Harout Pamboukjian is one of the biggest Armenian folk singers in the world. In the '70s, he was making these records that were really Zeppelin-influenced.
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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.
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In terms of political things, I think it's important to be more direct in terms of political statements. I think in terms of philosophical and things that you plant things and see them grow lyrically or musically, it's okay to be subtle.
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I think the gift of music is it's intuitive capability. I think music is a powerful medium because it co-inspires. It inspires the artist who then inspires the listener, and it's a back-and-forth process. Because it's intuitive, the truth has to be defined intuitively. It can't be preached, it can't be pushed. It's got to normally go across organically and make someone feel something, and that's the power of music.
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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.
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Why don't presidents fight the war? - Why do they always send the poor?
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I am depressed sometimes, but it's not what keeps me at home or focused on work.
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I'd rather let the music speak for itself.
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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.
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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.
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Sometimes it's better to have a benign dictator than a dumb democracy, to be honest.
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How does a band like System of a Down get big?
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I think I might write a book. I like writing. People have asked me if I would get into politics, but I think I feel a lot more effective being a representative of truth through the arts.
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I'm not very happy. I'm frustrated with human beings. I'm the guy who just wants to smack people in the face and say, 'Wake up!'
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I'll always be a member of System of a Down. That will never change.
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People always ask me 'do you think there should be more bands doing political music?' and I say 'absolutely not.'
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I think music is an intuitive force. It's this beautiful wave that connects all of us and inspires us, and I think music has the ability - when you listen to a song, you're not immediately thinking about the lyrics or what's going on in the mind of the writer, you're feeling the song.
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I think anytime that you go to the extreme of any mode of economics, be it capitalism or communism, you have these feedback mechanisms that make the system turn in on itself.