Jimmy Breslin Quotes

When things happen socially in our community, as artists, we've got the right to exercise our voices if we choose to, use our powers for good.

I always feel we have to work both outside and inside of our existing institutions, so we have to really be careful about who we vote for and examine carefully our institutions and what they're meant to do and how they're being violated. I also think we need movements from below that oppose what Trump administration and administrations like it are doing to ordinary people.

Burmese authors and artists can play the role that artists everywhere play. They help to mold the outlook of a society - not the whole outlook and they are not the only ones to mold the outlook of society, but they have an important role to play there. And I think if they take up this role seriously and link it to the kind of changes were wish to bring about in our country they could be a tremendous help.

I think being an activist and an artist is an interesting contradiction, because so often they are at odds with one another. When you write as an artist you have to clean the palate of your own politics in creating characters and activism is kind of the exact opposite.

Paul Robeson once said that the artist has the responsibility to either help liberate the community or further oppress it. And I think that when Eldridge Cleaver wrote it down it was interpreted as his, but there's a history of people saying things of that nature and meaning it. And what I do is in that tradition, in that mode.

I think if you're going to make political art, you have to engage at some level. You can't just write about politics, you have to try and be politics as well.

If we don't like what the Republicans do, we need to get in there and change it.

Party action should follow, not precede the creation of a dominant popular sentiment.

I'm asking you to talk with your friends, neighbors, and relatives - even the ones you've never talked to about reproductive rights. That's how you can throw your number in the bucket, and stand with a president who has stood with us. Conversation by conversation, vote by vote, we will re-elect President Barack Obama!

Rock the Vote

Citizens are refined, cultivated, and very political. I believe in the legitimacy of their participation.

The goal in the end is not to win elections. The goal is to change society.

Millennials don't go to rallies.

We want to get people of color out to vote, because their vote matters. Every politician tries to capture it. But it's More Than a Vote because we want to come up with what's our ask, and hold these politicians' feet to the fire to make real change.

I've always been political.

If there are political programs on TV, yet it takes an artist to actually energize political debate, that tells you something really quite frightening about the level of the political debate happening on mainstream channels - right-wing-biased mothers.

Artists are in the imagining/ prototyping business. Society needs people to be out there thinking of what might be. That cannot be something we just delegate to politicians or technologists.

We don't stop talking about how the world might be better just because we have no chance of making it to Prime Minister. We are all politicians. We are all artists. In an open society everything the mind and hands can achieve is our birthright. It is up to us to claim it.

I don't even think much about politicians. I think about the people in the audience who applaud the politicians. They are your fellow countrymen and they're the ones you live with - that should be who we target for education and enlightenment.

I understand what's going on in people's minds, and I think the political leaders better be asking themselves 'why is it, that Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders and maybe even others are having the impact that they are having?'

I do think that all politicians today have to be more attentive to people wanting to be heard, wanting to have more control over their lives.

When people say things like "don't let this moment pass without acting on gun control," what they're really saying is our arguments are so unpersuasive that they can only succeed when people aren't thinking clearly.

I think, in my own state, I can tell you that people do want to hear a serious discussion on serious issues.

Musicians have the power to influence people and along with movie makers, they can reach and influence more people than any group of people, more than scientists and certainly more than politicians.

It's not true that voting doesn't make a difference. To check out is political suicide. This is especially true for our young black artists. You don't want to inadvertently end up doing someone's bidding.