System Of A Down Quotes
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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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Back in the day, when the emperor or the king or whatever waged war, they went to war, too. But that's been lost in time.
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Corporatization is the descendant of industrialization.
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Sometimes a good love song can change the world and create positive energy more than any political song can.
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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.
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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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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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People always ask me 'do you think there should be more bands doing political music?' and I say 'absolutely not.'
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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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I am depressed sometimes, but it's not what keeps me at home or focused on work.
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As an artist, you never want to write the same song again, you always want to challenge yourself to writing in a different way.
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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'd rather let the music speak for itself.
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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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I write music when I'm free and for no particular project in mind.
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I've always tried to listen to a lot of different music from around the world.
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Sometimes it's better to have a benign dictator than a dumb democracy, to be honest.
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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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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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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 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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The living ideas of the dead are more powerful and effective than the dead ideas of the living.
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How does a band like System of a Down get big?