BOOTS RILEY

You can't co-opt labor issues if you are in the working class.

Making movies seemed so impossible as far as getting my ideas funded.

The United States is going to keep on with its imperialist ways.

The album 'Party Music' is a beautiful album, and people need to hear it.

People want something that's relevant to their lives. They want something that means something to them, and they want something where it seems like people have thought about what they're saying.

The ultimate credo of capitalism is to exploit people. It's not like this is just an incidental problem; it's inherent in the system.

Either I'm really into the organizing, or I'm really into the music. As I've been going, I've been able to figure out ways to even it out a little more.

I don't need to be validated by academia, because that presupposes that academia is a pure endeavor and not guided by market forces, which is not the case.

I think art is communication. To that extent, it can be the words between the words. It has a possibility of communicating something more than people can do with prose or just talking.

A record is a commodity, but so is a hamburger. Just because I work at McDonald's doesn't mean I reap the benefits of that commodity. That's the reality with most artists in the record industry: They're getting paid a subsistence wage so they can keep producing a commodity for the record label.

I think voting is the lowest form of political action that you can do. A lot of times, it keeps people from doing stronger things.

That punk approach of 'We don't wanna get big' is really a bourgeois thing. It's not a tactic of people that actually have been successful at changing things.

The Obama campaign decimated the newly regenerated anti-war movement in 2008. And he definitely isn't anti-war.

If we created a society based on love, it would be a society without exploitation.

Because of my politics, I don't necessarily think that the independent capitalist is that much better than the multinational capitalist; it's just that the independent capitalist hasn't grown as big yet.

Many people feel that unions aren't militant enough for them and don't do anything.

Sometimes my influences are really on my sleeve. So I just make sure to wear a lot of sleeves.

There's this zeitgeist happening, and people are more open to 'Sorry to Bother You' being a hit with 'Get Out' being out there. But that zeitgeist is also happening because of the movements going back to Occupy and Black Lives Matter. Usually, film is years behind. It just so happens that, this time, everything is lining up.

I'm not a classically trained composer, and I can't sing very well.

I'd been working since I was eleven so I could buy my own comic books. I was that kid knocking on your door, selling subscriptions to the paper and crying because I wasn't going to sell that last paper that would allow me to go to Disneyland.

Capitalism and people who control the market have a large hand in everything. It doesn't have anything to do with figuring out what the crowd wants to hear. It has to do with the media deciding what they think people want to hear.

The Box would not play 'Takin' These' because we had a scene where we were taking furniture out of Rockefeller's mansion and giving the stuff out on the street for free.

'Redistributing the wealth' - that phrase gets used so much that you almost get numb to it.

If the only time you bang the drum is when it's time to get someone elected, and you don't get involved in a mass movement, then you're working against real and substantive change.

I think that in order to make revolution, you need to make reforms, but you should make these reforms with revolution in mind.