Top 90 Banksy Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “If you are dirty, insignificant and unloved then rats are the ultimate role model.”

— Banksy

52. “I like to think I have the guts to stand up anonymously in a western democracy and call for things no-one else believes in – like peace and justice and freedom.”

— Banksy

53. “It doesn’t take much to be a successful artist-all you need to do is dedicate your entire life to it.”

— Banksy

54. “Painting something that defies the law of the land is good. Painting something that defies the law of the land and the law of gravity at the same time is ideal.”

— Banksy

55. “I’d been painting rats for three years before someone said ‘that’s clever it’s an anagram of art’ and I had to pretend I’d known that all along.”

— Banksy

56. “The art world is the biggest joke going. It’s a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak. And modern art is a disgrace – never have so many people used so much stuff and taken so long to say so little.”

— Banksy

57. “There are no exceptions to the rule that everyone thinks they’re an exception to the rules.”

— Banksy

58. “Some people represent authority without ever possessing any of their own.”

— Banksy

59. “If Michaelangelo or Leonardo Da Vinci were alive today they’d be making Avatar, not painting a chapel.”

— Banksy

60. “You’re advised not to drink the replica Arab spring water.”

— Banksy

61. “Stencils are good for two reasons; one – they’re quick; two – they annoy idiots.”

— Banksy

62. “You live in the city and all the time there are signs telling you what to do and billboards trying to sell you something.”

— Banksy

63. “A wall is a very big weapon. It’s one of the nastiest things you can hit someone with.”

— Banksy

64. “Sometimes I feel so sick at the state of the world I can’t even finish my second apple pie.”

— Banksy

65. “When you go to an art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires.”

— Banksy

66. “Nothing is black and white, and there is no purity and there is no such thing has justice.”

— Banksy

67. “Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing.”

— Banksy

68. “All graffiti is low-level dissent, but stencils have an extra history. They’ve been used to start revolutions and to stop wars.”

— Banksy

69. “If you want someone to be ignored then build a life-size bronze statue of them and stick it in the middle of town. It doesn’t matter how great you were, it’ll always take an unfunny drunk with climbing skills to make people notice you.”

— Banksy

70. “A recent survey or North American males found 42% were overweight, 34% were critically obese and 8% ate the survey.”

— Banksy

71. “I don’t know if street art ever really works indoors. If you domesticate an animal, it goes from being wild and free to sterile, fat and sleepy. So maybe the art should stay outside.”

— Banksy

72. “People seem to think if they dress like a revolutionary they don’t actually have to behave like one.”

— Banksy

73. “I am unable to comment on who may or may not be Banksy, but anyone described as being ‘good at drawing’ doesn’t sound like Banksy to me.”

— Banksy

74. “Anyone who believes in capital punishment should be shot.”

— Banksy

75. “I give away thousands of paintings for free.”

— Banksy

76. “People who enjoy waving flags don’t deserve to have one.”

— Banksy

77. “I used to encourage everyone I knew to make art; I don’t do that so much anymore.”

— Banksy

78. “I want to live in a world created by art, not just decorated with it.”

— Banksy

79. “I tell myself I use art to promote dissent, but maybe I am just using dissent to promote my art. I plead not guilty to selling out. But I plead it from a bigger house than I used to live in.”

— Banksy

80. “I wanted to highlight the destruction in Gaza by posting photos on my website – but on the internet people only look at pictures of kittens.”

— Banksy

81. “There’s obviously nothing wrong with selling your art – only an idiot with a trust fund would tell you otherwise. But it’s confusing to know how far you should take it.”

— Banksy

82. “The holy grail is to spend less time making the picture than it takes people to look at it.”

— Banksy

83. “You ask a lot of little kids today what they want to be when they grow up and they say “I want to be famous.” You ask them for what reason and they don’t know or care. I think Andy Warhol got it wrong: in the future so many people are going to become famous that one day everybody will end up being anonymous for fifteen minutes.”

— Banksy

84. “If you have a statue in the city centre you could go past it every day on your way to school and never even notice it, right. But as soon as someone puts a traffic cone on its head, you’ve made your own sculpture.”

— Banksy

85. “The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules. It’s people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages. As a precaution to never committing major acts of evil it is our solemn duty never to do what we’re told, this is the only way we can be sure.”

— Banksy

86. “This is a big surprise I don’t agree with the concept of award ceremonies, but I’m prepared to make an exception for the ones I’m nominated for. The last time there was a naked man covered in gold paint in my house, it was me.”

— Banksy

87. “I wouldnt want to be remembered as the guy who contaminated a perfectly legitimate form of protest art with money and celebrities.”

— Banksy

88. “People either love me or they hate me, or they don’t really care.”

— Banksy

89. “It’s a very frustrated feeling you get when the only people with good photos of you work are the police department.”

— Banksy

90. “Today’s art has been cancelled due to police activity.”

— Banksy

91. “I know street art can feel increasingly like the marketing wing of an art career, so I wanted to make some art without the price tag attached. There’s no gallery show or book or film. It’s pointless. Which hopefully means something.”

— Banksy

92. “The one thing you can rely on is if you get disturbed halfway through a painting and it looks a bit naff, then someone will preserve that piece, remove it and a few months later it’ll be paraded round Sotheby’s by people wearing white gloves.”

— Banksy

93. “As far as I can tell the only thing worth looking at in most museums of art is all the schoolgirls on daytrips with the art departments.”

— Banksy

94. “The human race is the most stupid and unfair kind of race. A lot of the runners don’t even get decent sneakers or clean drinking water. Some runners are born with a massive head start, every possible help along the way and still the referees seem to be on their side. It’s not surprising a lot of people have given up competing altogether and gone to sit in the grandstand, eat junk and shout abuse. What the human race needs is a lot more streakers.”

— Banksy

95. “All I know about what people think of my gear is what a couple of my friends tell me, and one of them always wants to borrow money, so I’m not sure how reliable he is.”

— Banksy

96. “People are fond of using military terms to describe what they do. We call it bombing when we go out painting, when of course it’s more like entertaining the troops in a neutral zone, during peacetime in a country without an army.”

— Banksy

97. “This revolution is for display purposes only.”

— Banksy