Mikis Theodorakis

“I put one questions. For whom I compose? My answer is I wanted to address to all my people. And if I write music for the Greek people because I'm Greek, I compose for all the people.”

“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.”

“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.”

“My father's father fought to free Crete from the Turks, who expelled my mother from her ancestral home in Asia Minor in 1922. So how could I stand aside from my country's troubles?”

“Oh, what am I for the Frenchman or the Italian? A guy who was in prison, a revolutionary, somebody they once read something about in the newspaper - but not me.”

“In Greece, the picket line is forbidden.”

“My music had two protagonists, me and the Greek people.”

“A man who goes to jail for his ideas is much freer than his keepers.”

“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.”

“This taste of freedom is still bitter because left in Athens are my wife and my two children and because so many of my comrades are suffering.”

“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 love the Jewish people, I love the Jews!”

“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.”

“For me the root of evil today is the policy of President Bush. It is a fascist policy. I cannot understand how is it that the Jewish people, who have been the victims of Nazism, can support such a fascist policy. No other people in the world support those policies but Israel! This situation saddens me.”

“The Greeks have needlessly been maneuvered towards the abyss.”

“I like to have the feeling I'm creating something.”

“My dream is to turn Europe into 300 million princes.”

“In America the Jewish community is very strong. It controls much of the economy. Certainly the mass media.”

“I wanted to unite the popular and the serious, and to make a popular symphony, a popular oratorio.”

“New York is a town of my height.”