Mikis Theodorakis

“I write for all the peoples of all the world.”

“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?”

“Macedonia was, is and will forever be Greek.”

“We're in danger! Zionism and it leaders are here, meeting in our country! This is no laughing matter.”

“In the Averoff prison hospital I saw men who had had the bones in their feet broken by the severity of the torture.”

“I have again decided to leave my cultural obligations and music to enter the political arena this time to contribute with all my force to ending, once and for all, the PASOK state.”

“I was thankful to him, this man who freed me. At the same time I was annoyed be cause the man who freed me doesn't have the right to speak for me. I had no intention to disavow my old principles. But to disavow Servan Schreiber made for problems.”

“I have been trying for years to perform in America. Now the first time I am here there is a strike. I must play. It is what I must do.”

“In my youth there must have been 15 synagogues in Salonika alone.”

“American Jews are behind the world economic crisis that has hit Greece also.”

“Always I have lived with two sounds - one political, one musical.”

“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.”

“For films, I'm very difficult.”

“I will always be a political animal.”

“All our problems happened because the Americans made all the decisions.”

“I'll write three operas - one for Verdi, one for Puccini, and one for Bellini.”