Top 60 Serj Tankian Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I think music has the ability to inspire people and to change hearts, and the heart has the power to change the mind, and the mind has the power to change the world.”

— Serj Tankian

2. “Science has failed our mother Earth.”

— Serj Tankian

3. “Civilization is a failure. We need to think what we can do together in love and peace.”

— Serj Tankian

4. “Freedom is only available through Death!”

— Serj Tankian

5. “Life is that perfect fine line between ironies.”

— Serj Tankian

6. “Spirit moves through all things.”

— Serj Tankian

7. “Pretending that we live doesn’t make us alive.”

— Serj Tankian

8. “Day is just a collection of hours.”

— Serj Tankian

9. “I think music is an intuitive force. It’s this beautiful wave that connects all of us and inspires us, and I think music has the ability – when you listen to a song, you’re not immediately thinking about the lyrics or what’s going on in the mind of the writer, you’re feeling the song.”

— Serj Tankian

10. “The living ideas of the dead are more powerful and effective than the dead ideas of the living.”

— Serj Tankian

11. “With rock music, the amount of power that you can generate, the intensity behind the intentions of your lyrics that you can really reflect through rock music – you can’t do that in jazz. You can’t do that with classical.”

— Serj Tankian

12. “I believe very firmly that indigenous populations had a really good, intuitive understanding of why we’re here. And we’re trying to gain that same understanding through psychology and intellect in modern civilization.”

— Serj Tankian

13. “You can say a lot more with a poem than you can with a song, but with a song you can really be more powerful with it. You can express it a lot more powerfully.”

— Serj Tankian

14. “I think nobody wants to hear a sermon. Well, some people do, but maybe not through music or not with me. No one wants to hear me give a speech that way.”

— Serj Tankian

15. “If you allow for a purely capitalistic society, without any type of regulation at all, you will get one monopoly that will eat all of the smaller fish and own everything, and then you’ll have zero capitalism, zero competition – it would just be one giant company.”

— Serj Tankian

16. “Corporatization is the descendant of industrialization.”

— Serj Tankian

17. “We’re addicted to this concept of civilization – we can’t imagine living outside of it because we’ve had it for 10,000 years, all of what we call history. But according to archaeologists, humanity has been on this planet for millions of years in indigenous form.”

— Serj Tankian

18. “I don’t find most people to be as politically engaged as I am. I do find people that appreciate eye-opening events and words, and who want to learn more about what’s going on. I do find people with a lot of opinions. And I get a lot of people who come up to me and give us props for what we do.”

— Serj Tankian

19. “Composing is what I love most from what I do. Each genre has a unique expression that you cannot supplant with another. All the records co-inspire each other though they are not tied conceptually in any way to another.”

— Serj Tankian

20. “What does civilization mean to you, and what would its ending bring to the world?”

— Serj Tankian

21. “People always ask me ‘do you think there should be more bands doing political music?’ and I say ‘absolutely not.’”

— Serj Tankian

22. “The most important thing about music that I’ve learned after all this time is that to me, it’s a way of reaching the truth.”

— Serj Tankian

23. “It’s important for all people, and not just people in bands, to speak out on social justice issues. That means journalists or plumbers have just as much of a responsibility to do that as artists.”

— Serj Tankian

24. “Sometimes it’s better to have a benign dictator than a dumb democracy, to be honest.”

— Serj Tankian

25. “We have the power to change our lives, and the world around us.”

— Serj Tankian

26. “I hate injustice, and I can’t help but speak against it. But I don’t want to get involved in politics.”

— Serj Tankian

27. “Awareness in our society has flipped all types of injustice on its head.”

— Serj Tankian

28. “Capitalism unchecked is not a democratic system.”

— Serj Tankian

29. “I think anytime that you go to the extreme of any mode of economics, be it capitalism or communism, you have these feedback mechanisms that make the system turn in on itself.”

— Serj Tankian

30. “To deny a genocide because of convenience and expediency having to do with an illegal war or occupation in Iraq to me, is double hypocritical.”

— Serj Tankian

31. “I think that the memory of Armenia’s genocide opened my eyes at an early age to the existence of political cynicism.”

— Serj Tankian

32. “Harout Pamboukjian is one of the biggest Armenian folk singers in the world. In the ’70s, he was making these records that were really Zeppelin-influenced.”

— Serj Tankian

33. “In America, there’s more of the question, should music be political or should it just be for entertainment purposes, whereas around the world that’s not even an issue. I think people just assume that music should be everything.”

— Serj Tankian

34. “I’d rather let the music speak for itself.”

— Serj Tankian

35. “When I was younger, I was listening to a lot of Armenian music, you know, revolutionary music about freedom and protest. In the 70s I was listening to soul and the Bee Gees and ABBA, and funk.”

— Serj Tankian

36. “In terms of political things, I think it’s important to be more direct in terms of political statements. I think in terms of philosophical and things that you plant things and see them grow lyrically or musically, it’s okay to be subtle.”

— Serj Tankian

37. “I don’t want to spend all my time working as an activist. I don’t get satisfaction out of it. I’d rather be doing something else. I’m a musician.”

— Serj Tankian

38. “I think every artist should follow their vision, their hearts is what they need to reveal, not something that society is looking out for.”

— Serj Tankian

39. “In the last few years I’ve been listening to jazz more than anything else. I listen to a lot of world music and experimental here and there.”

— Serj Tankian

40. “Sometimes a good love song can change the world and create positive energy more than any political song can.”

— Serj Tankian

41. “I like African music, and I’m a huge Ravi Shankar fan.”

— Serj Tankian

42. “As long as people are living their truth or their vision, whether they’re activists or not, that’s the important thing.”

— Serj Tankian

43. “I have a more direct avenue to expression as an artist than I ever would as a politician.”

— Serj Tankian

44. “My two interests are spirituality and politics. I would mesh them in some way; maybe try to figure out the politics of spirituality, or the spirituality of politics. Or maybe come up with this really crazy naive solution for the end of civilization.”

— Serj Tankian

45. “With most of the songs and music that I’ve composed, irrespective of the myriad videos made, I was always careful not to overly define the experience, leaving room for people to internalize things for themselves, making their experience more integral.”

— Serj Tankian

46. “I think I might write a book. I like writing. People have asked me if I would get into politics, but I think I feel a lot more effective being a representative of truth through the arts.”

— Serj Tankian

47. “The percentage of Americans in the prison system, has doubled since 1985.”

— Serj Tankian

48. “I’ve always tried to listen to a lot of different music from around the world.”

— Serj Tankian

49. “I’m not comfortable with just entertaining. Although I like entertaining, I also like bringing forward the truth of our times as minstrels used to in the old days.”

— Serj Tankian

50. “I’ve got my own studio, and I’ve got four- to five-hundred unreleased tracks. I’ve got stuff that’s electronic, orchestral, jazz, I’ve got rock, I’ve got metal, you know, I don’t have polka.”

— Serj Tankian