Top 60 Saul Williams Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Come, my love, we have oceans to sail.”

— Saul Williams

2. “Vulnerability is power.”

— Saul Williams

3. “We are unraveling our navels so that we may ingest the sun. We are not afraid of the darkness. We trust that the moon shall guide us. We are determining the future at this very moment. We know that the heart is the philosopher’s stone. Our music is our alchemy.”

— Saul Williams

4. “The role that theater has placed in enhancing consciousness and moving systems ahead. I think of what South African theater meant for the apartheid movement, for example. I think of what music has meant for so many social movements across time.”

— Saul Williams

5. “Fax me a fact and I’ll telegram a hologram or telephone the son of man and tell him he is done. Leave a message on his answering machine telling him there are none. God and I are one. Times moon. Times star. Times sun. The factor is me. You remember me.”

— Saul Williams

6. “Fax me a fact, and I’ll telegram a hologram.”

— Saul Williams

7. “I have offered myself to the inkwell of the wordsmith that I might be shaped into new terms of being.”

— Saul Williams

8. “I surrendered my beliefs and found myself at the tree of life injecting my story into the veins of leaves only to find that stories like forests are subject to seasons.”

— Saul Williams

9. “Music has always pushed ahead social movements and can do much more than just dumb down a populace.”

— Saul Williams

10. “I’m very excited about the resurgence of vinyl which seems to parallel a growing interest in live performance.”

— Saul Williams

11. “Hip-hop is too young to put a definition on it.”

— Saul Williams

12. “What’s wrong with hip-hop is the system that controls the definition of it. There needs to be more balance on the airwaves.”

— Saul Williams

13. “I have a very family-like connection to hip-hop, which is why it frustrates me so much.”

— Saul Williams

14. “Jay Z and President Bush have a lot in common, that same brash confidence.”

— Saul Williams

15. “We cannot continually barricade ourselves under some falsified idea of race, because our idea of blackness and race is simply reactionary. Africans didnt walk around Africa being black and proud, they walked around proud.”

— Saul Williams

16. “Two autumns and I have not changed enough.”

— Saul Williams

17. “They say that I am a poet I wonder what they would say if they saw me from the inside I bottle emotions and place them into the sea for others to unbottle on distant shores I am unsure as to whether they ever reach and for that matter as to whether I ever get my point across or my love.”

— Saul Williams

18. “The wind is the moon’s imagination wandering.”

— Saul Williams

19. “I dance for no reason, for reasons you can’t dance, Call me an activist of intellectualized circumstance You can’t learn my steps until you unlearn your thoughts Spirit, soul, can’t be store-bought.”

— Saul Williams

20. “Dying is something you have no control over. Why waste your life being afraid of it?”

— Saul Williams

21. “When I can feel you breathing into me i, like a stone gargoyle atop some crumbling building, spring to life a resuscitated angel.”

— Saul Williams

22. “Legislation won’t necessarily start a riot. But the right song can make someone pick up a chair.”

— Saul Williams

23. “The most powerful political voices are those with a different way of seeing and processing the world and the sounds that emanate from it.”

— Saul Williams

24. “My father’s a preacher, my mother’s a teacher, thus I rhyme.”

— Saul Williams

25. “You change the beat up, you might change the way people dance to the music. If you change the way they move, maybe they’ll think about it differently.”

— Saul Williams

26. “The hero is the person who’s afraid to run away.”

— Saul Williams

27. “I feel that people need to be jolted out of their comfort zones.”

— Saul Williams

28. “There is nothing more negligent than attempting to address a problem one finds on a branch than by censoring the leaves.”

— Saul Williams

29. “American culture is often so self-consumed that we often think that our problems are just our problems.”

— Saul Williams

30. “There is no music more powerful than hip-hop. No other music so purely demands an instant affirmative on such a global scale. When the beat drops, people nod their heads, “yes,” in the same way that they would in conversation with a loved one, a parent, professor, or minister.”

— Saul Williams

31. “I remember back in the day when Chuck D called hip-hop the ‘black people’s CNN.’ Well now, hip-hop is more like Fox News. It’s biased, and highly suspect.”

— Saul Williams

32. “I was always making up rhymes. But I never thought that poetry would become my life.”

— Saul Williams

33. “I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It’s not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written.”

— Saul Williams

34. “Some rather seek up high Than dig and grind that inner truth.”

— Saul Williams

35. “Why shouldn’t rap be esoteric, able to take in current events, history and criticism? I guess it’s this old idea of containment – that rappers, because they’re black, can’t and shouldn’t aspire to look outside the ghetto for influence.”

— Saul Williams

36. “I’ve never believed it’s really so important that you conform to the ways of the system in order to beat the system. I think that the system follows a great deal.”

— Saul Williams

37. “I think that good writing is based on good reading. Maybe it’s not about writing today, maybe it’s about reading today. Maybe it’s about finding the sort of book you would never read.”

— Saul Williams

38. “Hip-hop is still cool at a party. But to me, hip-hop has never been strictly a party; it is also there to elevate consciousness.”

— Saul Williams

39. “You can travel through literature, and you can expand your mind through literature. It’s so cheap to buy that kind of ticket.”

— Saul Williams

40. “For all the ghosts and corpses that shall never know the breath of our children so long for the sacrifice and endurance of our mothers and the sustained breath of our fathers we live.”

— Saul Williams

41. “I think art can really serve to inspire a movement – and, of course, it has in the past. The Civil Rights movement wouldn’t have the same resonance without the songs from everyone from Pete Seeger to Odetta to James Brown.”

— Saul Williams

42. “Art itself is underserved when we don’t realize the power of it.”

— Saul Williams

43. “I think it’s misleading to think that art is only there for escapism, only there for our dreams of being rich and f – king whoever we wanna f – k.”

— Saul Williams

44. “We all have different relationships with music. But the music is always there.”

— Saul Williams

45. “I used to have weird practices in crowded used-book stores in New York where I’d go in and just stomp my foot and see what fell from the shelf. And of course, because it’s an unexpected encounter, there’s always some magic that comes from it.”

— Saul Williams

46. “The music aids the message, it’s there to punctuate and abbreviate and shape the silence.”

— Saul Williams

47. “I think it’s a mistake where rap music is these days. It doesn’t seem to be able to look out of the ghetto and that’s ultimately unfortunate, because it defines our limitations.”

— Saul Williams

48. “I am hoping for peaceful transition into a new age. Obama has already played a great role in initiating us into that vision. If he were to be harmed in any way, it would spawn the birth of a million Obamas.”

— Saul Williams

49. “The downfall of the industry seems to actually be good for art. I think the industry will find their way once the focus shifts from its greed-based origins, downsizes, and begins to support creative visions that speak to our times and shifting ideals.”

— Saul Williams

50. “More people than ever are slowly but surely turning their ears toward poetry.”

— Saul Williams