Quotes from Mikis Theodorakis

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.

In Greece, the picket line is forbidden.

I want to leave this world as a Communist.

I compose for the common man, for our epoch.

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 like always to be contemporary. I like to deal with the things of today.

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

My dream is to turn Europe into 300 million princes.

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.

I've directed fragmentarily at the Herod Atticus, but never before a popular laiko unitals concert.

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.

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.

Greece is the only country in the Balkans that does not have territorial designs on its neighbors and wants to live in peace with them.

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 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.

Macedonia was, is and will forever be Greek.

The Greeks have needlessly been maneuvered towards the abyss.

We people, maybe because we have the greatest wisdom, we are also mad. We destroy the harmony of the world.

New York is a town of my height.

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

All the time I see things that remind me very much of the 1930s.

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.

Those who had talked to us about national pride and Christian brotherly love were the first to come to terms or actively collaborate with the Germans. It was an immense blow to my entire intellectual and emotional existence.

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