Words matter. These are the best Mikis Theodorakis Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I mixed with a lot of peasants, workers, artists and writers, all deprived of work. That’s when I understood human beings have an instinct toward knowledge.
There was a Yugoslav film about partisans that I’ve done the music for, and then I’ve promised to score a French film called ‘Biribi’ about detention camps at the turn of the century.
I got hundreds and hundreds of poisonous e-mails from Jews all over the world. I couldn’t understand this hatred toward me. I fought against racism all my life. I was for Israel. I wrote ‘Mauthausen.’ After all that, how could I become from one day to the next an anti-Semite?
Whether art is music or cinema or whatever, it really is art only when it is in touch with the people – forced to respond to their agonies, their joys and their aspirations.
In my youth there must have been 15 synagogues in Salonika alone.
I am a song of my times. I wasn’t living in Vienna, like Mozart or Beethoven. In my circumstances, it was impossible to be indifferent.
When I was still a child, there was the Metaxis, a Fascist Youth Movement in which all subteenagers and teenagers were obligatory members, where they tried to imbue us with two ideals – nationalism and Christianity.
I’ll write three operas – one for Verdi, one for Puccini, and one for Bellini.
The Greeks have needlessly been maneuvered towards the abyss.
The established politicians, who before the war preached national pride and Christian love, were the first to collaborate with the Germans. But the communists, who as children we’d been taught to fear, kept a resistance movement alive, living and dying true to their ideals.
For films, I’m very difficult.
In Greece there is a very particular situation because on one hand the colonels took away everyone’s political rights, but at the same time the economic and social situation improved.
I would not sacrifice myself for a system like the Soviet system to be established in Greece.
I want to leave this world as a Communist.
The conservatory professors thought everything should sound like French and German symphonies. But to my ear, bouzouki songs, which tell the sufferings and heartaches of ordinary people, offered a way to make classical music available not just to the upper classes.
We people, maybe because we have the greatest wisdom, we are also mad. We destroy the harmony of the world.
All our problems happened because the Americans made all the decisions.
I love the Jewish people, I love the Jews!
I will always be a political animal.
I write for all the peoples of all the world.
I like always to be contemporary. I like to deal with the things of today.
In the Averoff prison hospital I saw men who had had the bones in their feet broken by the severity of the torture.
We’re in danger! Zionism and it leaders are here, meeting in our country! This is no laughing matter.
We saw that on the Turkish side there was a sincere wish for peace. But before I could even put my foot back on Greek soil people called me a traitor.
We cry. The Greeks cry because we have not an objective today. Yesterday we have objective to put off the dictatorship. Today the objective is to find ourselves.
