Quotes About Expression

It's not those who write the laws that have the greatest impact on society. It's those who write the songs.

To me, a painter, if not the most useful, is the least harmful member of our society.

Boys, you must strive to find your own voice, because the longer you wait to begin the less likely you are to find it at all.

I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world.

Language has no independent existence apart from the people who use it. It is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end of understanding who you are and what society is like.

The freedom of any society varies proportionately with the volume of its laughter.

I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried deep in society's flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a sign.

Most writers are not quick-witted when they talk. Novelists, in particular, drag themselves around in society like gut-shot bears.

If there is no freedom of expression, then the beauty of life is lost. Participation in a society is not an artistic choice, it's a human need.

What a society deems important is enshrined in its art

A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

Art in its highest form is art that serves and instructs society and human development.

What I find interesting is working in a society with certain taboos and fashion photography is about that kind of society. To have taboos, then to get around them that is interesting.

How awful that the artist has become nothing but the after-dinner mint of society.

The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep.

If it adapts itself to what the majority of our society wants, art will be a meaningless recreation.

Artists are going to be the metronome of this society.

Where can you scream? It's a serious question: where can you go in society and scream?

What concerns all, should be considered by all; and individuals may injure a whole society, by not declaring their sentiments. It is therefore not only their right, but their duty, to declare them.

Poetry, in the past, was the center of our society, but with modernity it has retreated to the outskirts. I think the exile of poetry is also the exile of the best of humankind.

A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas.

More than anything else, we need in this society the opportunity for people to tell us what they think without being told that they're either dumb, or stupid, or uninformed.

So if we have anything original to offer, it's to speak from our own life about the society we're in.

If you never encounter anything in your community that offends you, then you are not living in a free society.