Serj Tankian

“Day is just a collection of hours.”

“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 fun...”

“The best way to do that is to pick up a new instrument or an instrument that you don't typically write on and see where it takes you. Whether it's using an acoustic guitar, or piano, or elec...”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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 hav...”

“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 concept...”

“I've always worked on all different types of music, some with specific project goals and deadlines and some not. Sometimes I would write a piece of music that is almost like a film score or...”

“Corporatization is the descendant of industrialization.”

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

“I think every artist should follow their vision; their hearts is what they need to reveal, not something that society is looking out for. That said though, I think also artists have, continu...”

“I am more interested in how people interpret the phrase 'Elect The Dead' than what I may or may not have intended. I named the album after the track, which is a spiritual song about love, li...”

“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...”

“Life is that perfect fine line between ironies.”

“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.”

“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 th...”

“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, hu...”

“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 intell...”