Mikis Theodorakis Quotes

Mikis Theodorakis

Profession : Composer

Birth : July 29, 1925

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

Mikis Theodorakis

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

Mikis Theodorakis

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.

Mikis Theodorakis

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

Mikis Theodorakis

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

Mikis Theodorakis

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

Mikis Theodorakis

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

Mikis Theodorakis

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?

Mikis Theodorakis

I don't believe there is anti-Semitism in Europe. There is a reaction against the policy of Sharon and Bush. I think it's artificial to think there is a new anti-Semitism. It's an excuse. It's a way to avoid self-criticism.

Mikis Theodorakis

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.

Mikis Theodorakis

In America the Jewish community is very strong. It controls much of the economy. Certainly the mass media.

Mikis Theodorakis

In my youth there must have been 15 synagogues in Salonika alone.

Mikis Theodorakis

I will always be a political animal.

Mikis Theodorakis

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

Mikis Theodorakis

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

Mikis Theodorakis

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

Mikis Theodorakis

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.

Mikis Theodorakis

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.

Mikis Theodorakis

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?

Mikis Theodorakis

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.

Mikis Theodorakis