Quotes from Mikis Theodorakis

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.

I love the Jewish people, I love the Jews!

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

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?

I'm an anti-Semite but I love Jews.

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.

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'm not a communist or social democrat or anything else. I'm a free man.

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.

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?

I would not sacrifice myself for a system like the Soviet system to be established in Greece.

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

My work is based upon contemporary Greek poetry - poetry which is concerned with the problems of today's civilization and, of course, with simple personal feelings of love, nostalgia, etc.

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.

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.

I've been uprooted. I don't think a tree that's been uprooted as a happy tree and I'm not very happy. I can't be. I do not accept to be.

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.

I write for all the peoples of all the world.

When you think of it, you know, probably the biggest victim of our epoch is the American people because of all the crimes committed in its name.

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.

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.