Top 66 Boots Riley Quotes

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.

If people come to a record store, and they can’t find your album, they buy something else.

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.

If I want to get my ideas out, I have to be involved in the mechanism that the world is ran by.

The folks that are suggesting Occupy move to electoral politics are ignoring history, ignoring what actually creates change. People get involved in electoral politics because they think there is no movement that can create change.

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.

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 it’s important for us not just to edit the culture that capitalism creates but to create the material basis for a culture that we want.

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

The Occupy Wall Street movement, in general, by putting this idea out there that the one percent is leeching off the 99 percent, is making a new discussion, making people figure out how to withhold their labor and come and put their issues on the table with the ruling class all over the country and all over the world.

In Chile, they had penas, where the community would come together to sing and plan how they were going to overthrow the government. There’s a real hopefulness in that community style of organizing.

If what you want is actual change, then what has to be built is a mass movement that is militant and can use direct action to slow or stop profit. A movement that can do that can demand whatever it wants.

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.

A lot of organizers tell me that while they are making signs or doing whatever they do, they are listening to the Coup.

I think most people would love for us to be a socialist society.

Every progressive movement in U.S. history has been portrayed negatively by the media at the time it happened.

If I wasn’t rapping about politics, then I might have been just another person trying to sell albums, and I might have sounded like everyone else out there.

Until we can democratically control the wealth that is created from our labor, there isn’t real democracy.

I have a problem with superheroes in general because, politically, superheroes are cops. Superheroes work with the government to uphold the law. And who do the laws work for?

The Coup does not support the American flag.

One time, someone came up to me and said, ‘I know so-and-so. They’re a professor at Harvard. They’re a big fan of your work.’ But that doesn’t impress me more than any other people feeling that way.

With a movie, you have the power of putting out an idea about the world and for people to take it seriously.

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

I was actually really good at telemarketing.

The crux of our power isn’t only in our voice. It is in our economic function in society.

I want to fight the McCarthyist state that’s developing in this country so my kids won’t live in a world where people are afraid to speak out.

Going to school in San Francisco, you’re not going to meet as many people that are making films as you would if you went to film school in New York or L.A.

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

It’s nice to be recognized for what you do, but that doesn’t satisfy what I wanted out of this music, which is for people to hear it and get involved in movements and campaigns.

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.

Any collective action is made up of individuals who one day decided not to sit and watch anymore.

‘Redistributing the wealth’ – that phrase gets used so much that you almost get numb to it.

I always have thought that part of being involved with life is the same thing as just wanting to kick it with your friends, and being involved with life on a deeper level is wanting to change the situation that you’re in.

What I wanted to do is put forth, musically, the idea that there’s hope that we can change the system.

I’ve never really subscribed to the theory that repression breeds rebellion. I don’t think that’s really true.

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

There are a lot of leaders that talk about ending things like oppression – whether it’s discrimination or getting a job – but the reason for all of this stuff is somebody’s making a profit off our backs. That’s the reason why black people were brought here in the first place. It was a profit motive.

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

A lot of libertarians and ultra-capitalists like to put out this idea that competition makes for better creativity. But it’s just because we don’t see all the creativity that’s been crushed.

I try to find creative ways to put ideas out to make the ground fertile for organizers.

If you tell a story that’s only allegory, then it doesn’t help you at all. If it doesn’t bring some emotional charge, then it’s just talking about something.

I can run the gamut with beats that no one else would think of. I’m not a trained musician, so I focus on what feels right before I dispatch to writing.

What I like about music is that you make a song, you’ve got your ideas in it, and people make that song part of their life – they hang out with their friends to it, they get in arguments to it, they get married to it, they get divorced to it. It’s in their world, and it takes on its own life.

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

There’s the part of me that’s the organizer, part of me that’s the artist, part of me that’s the person who, even with those two things, wants to figure out what my place in the world is. How to engage with it and whether my life has any meaning.

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.

I’m not trying to make a speech on CD because who wants to buy that?

I used to be mad, at first, that I couldn’t sound like Ice Cube. And I think that was probably one of the best things for me.

We all – even at a base level, even a Republican – understand that the people with the money are the ones with the power. We all learn that.

Rarely, someone comes around that is influenced by so many things but is looking for a new way to do something.

We’re told, ‘If you want to change the world, vote.’ And really, if you want to change the world, there’s a lot more things that you can do.

My father is from North Carolina, and he got rid of his drawl really fast. He’s very much about speaking correctly, enunciating in certain ways.

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.

When people listen to Jay-Z, they’re working all day or trying to work and pay their bills, and what they hear is someone who’s free. Who doesn’t have to worry about the electricity. But all we’re taught is that those who are rich deserve to be rich because they worked harder than the rest of us, or they’re smarter.

This idea of ‘cool capitalism’ is still capitalism. It doesn’t matter if Elon Musk quotes Nas.

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

There are a lot of people out there doing cool work. I went to South Africa with Talib Kweli and the Roots for a couple of weeks. And even a lot of the groups that aren’t called ‘political’ or ‘revolutionary’ have a lot more to say than what you hear on the singles.

The tech world is not a new phenomenon; it’s a new era.

I listen to everything from The Cure and The Clash to Prince and George Clinton.

My father joined the NAACP when he was 12, in the ’50s. He was part of the organizing efforts that led to some of the first sit-ins in North Carolina.

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

The opportunism of electoral politics makes people lie to each other.

The point is, is that when you elect a politician, it has nothing to do with their personality. Politicians perform a function, a role in government. And the role of city government is not one that serves the people, unless the people make them do what the people want.