Tom Morello Quotes

Music, I think, is best when it honestly explores personal demons, and it stirs around in the silt of the psyche to find out what's really there.

- Tom Morello

Then about 12 years ago it dawned on me that folk music - the music of Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs, early Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Pete Seeger - could be as heavy as anything that comes through a Marshall stack. The combination of three chords and the right lyrical couplet can be as heavy as anything in the Metallica catalogue.

- Tom Morello

I didn't grow up with my Kenyan family. I grew up in a small, conservative suburb of Chicago.

- Tom Morello

The way corporate media likes to portray America is as a homogenous whole that high-five's each other at the Super Bowl. But what we have is a grotesque disparity between the rich and poor that is only getting wider.

- Tom Morello

I literally integrated the small town of Libertyville, Illinois. I was the first person of color to reside within its borders.

- Tom Morello

The real estate agent had to go door-to-door in the apartment building we wanted to rent, asking if it was OK for this interracial family - my mom is white and I was a 1-year-old half-African kid - to live in the apartment building.

- Tom Morello

I came late to the genre of folk music.

- Tom Morello

We've been able to have our cake and eat it, too. Every song, every T-shirt, is absolutely a pure expression of what we want to do. And it connects.

- Tom Morello

I was a fan of heavy music - first metal, then punk, then hip hop.

- Tom Morello

My parents met in Kenya. My father is African, is Kenyan. The Kenyan side of my family was involved in the anti-colonial movement.

- Tom Morello