Gil Scott-Heron Quotes

“All the dreams you show up in are not your own.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“You will not be able to stay home, brother./You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out./You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,/Skip out for beer during commercials,/Because the revolution will not be televised.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“You never cared enough to be Black”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“If someone comes to you and asks for help, and you can help them, you're supposed to help them. Why wouldn't you? You have been put in the position somehow to be able to help this person.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

Your life has to consist of more than 'Black people should unite.' You hope they do, but not twenty-four hours a day.

— Gil Scott-Heron

“The way you get to know yourself is by the expressions on other people's faces, because that's the only thing that you can see, unless you carry a mirror about.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“Every show that sells out is like a hero's welcome for me.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“The revolution that takes place in your head, nobody will ever see that.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“Everything that's bad for you catches on too quickly in America, because that's the easiest thing to get people to invest in, the pursuits that are easy and destructive, the ones that bring out the least positive aspects of people.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“Music has the power to make me feel good like nothing else does. It gives me some peace for a while. Takes me back to who I really am.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“You know what has made me the happiest I've ever been? Seeing my son and daughter graduate from college. More than wanting them to be educated, I wanted them to be nice people. To see that they have become both is just a wonderful thing.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“You see, revolution sounds like something that happens, like turning on the light switch, but actually it's moving a large obstacle, and a lot of folks' efforts to push it in one direction or the other have to combine.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

My songs were always about the tone of voice rather than the words.

— Gil Scott-Heron

“I was born in Chicago, but I was raised in a town called Jackson, Tennessee. And a lot of these changes that were necessary and talked about it as important have been made, like, people go to school where they want to go. They work for equal pay, they work for - they can go school and have an equal shot at a job.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“I have a novel that I can write. It's about three soldiers from Somalia. Some babies have been disappearing up on 144th Street, and I speculate later on what happened to them and how they might have been got back. These guys are dead, all three, and they have a chance in the afterlife to do something they should have done when they were alive.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“I was a better writer when I was teaching. I was constantly going over the basics and constantly reminding myself, as I reminded my students, what made a good story, a good poem.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“Every once in a while, you live long enough to get the respect that people didn't want to give while you were trying to become a senior citizen.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“I've always had questions about what it meant to be a protester, to be in the minority. Are the people who are trying to find peace, who are trying to have the Constitution apply to everybody, are they really the radicals? We're not protesting from the outside. We're inside.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“You have to learn and keep learning.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“I am honestly not sure how capable I am of love. And I'm not sure why.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

If you aren't having no fun, die, because you're running a worthless program, far as I'm concerned.

— Gil Scott-Heron

“Colour is not the issue in America; class is.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“I don't mind being criticized. I enjoy being criticized personally, not by rumor.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“I cannot afford to watch Fox News.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“Our accomplishments show what kind of people we are.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“If you're supposed to be doing something, the spirits will come and help you. They have helped me out with lines I shouldn't have known, chords I shouldn't have known. Every once in a while I get lines from somewhere, and I think, I better write this down.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

I was one of the first three black students to go to an all-white school in Tennessee.

— Gil Scott-Heron

“You should be able to do anything you can afford as an adult.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“I found my grandmother dead. It shook me up. I got up to make her breakfast, and I knew it was strange that she wasn't stirring. I went in to wake her, and she was laying in rigor mortis, and I'm done. I called next door, and the kid picked up the phone, and I was so wild, he dropped it.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“As for money - when I have it, it's great. When I don't, I go get some. I've been a dishwasher, a gardener, a cleaner.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“Schedule? I have no schedule. There is no hurry. I work when I want to.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“Womenfolk raised me, and I was full-grown before I knew I came from a broken home.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“I tour more than I need to, more than is good for you. But it's my favorite part of music. I much prefer it to studio work.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“Well, I grew up on the blues, man!”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“I learnt early on that your audience take the songs in the way they want to rather than the way you might want them too.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

I thought that some of my best records was when there wasn't a lot of work being done on it, like 'Winter in America' and 'Secrets' and when there weren't a whole lot of people in the studios.

— Gil Scott-Heron

“The first revolution is when you change your mind”

— Gil Scott-Heron

You see Martin Luther King is dead and Huey Newton is not. And Malcolm X is dead and Bobby Seale is not. And Vernon Jordan was shot. The thing that revolutionaries, or even people who want to claim they're revolutionaries, often forget is that it doesn't make no difference what kind of wardrobe you wear, and if you speak up about Black people doing better you just risked your life.

— Gil Scott-Heron

“Paul Robeson once said that the artist has the responsibility to either help liberate the community or further oppress it. And I think that when Eldridge Cleaver wrote it down it was interpreted as his, but there's a history of people saying things of that nature and meaning it. And what I do is in that tradition, in that mode.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“America .. the international Jekyll and Hyde ... the land of a thousand disguises, sneaks up on you but rarely surprises”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“I don't see any independent position that I'm in; it's rather inter-dependent.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

A good poet feels what his community feels.
Like if you stub your toe, the rest of your body hurts.

— Gil Scott-Heron

“If we meet somebody who has never made a mistake, lets help them start a religion. Until then, were just going to meet other humans and help to make each other better.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“The revolution will be no re-run brothers,
The revolution will be live.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

I try not to take people who haven't really thought out what they're doing too seriously. I try not to let them get in the way of what I feel I need to do.

— Gil Scott-Heron

“I find it not just strange but almost ridiculous that people could take a song like the one I was doing and interpret it is corroding anything. Folks have the feeling that oftentimes if you don't talk about something it will go away.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

When we were doing the "Angel Dust" thing we got information from the National Institute of Drug Abuse because we knew that if we went out and said something about angel dust people were going to ask questions about it and we wanted to be sure we had all the information to deal with it when those questions came up. So it's all a question of being as prepared as possible out front, so that if you are going to deal with information it'll be correct. A lot of people won't check it out but some people will.

— Gil Scott-Heron

The truth is that in this country you here you're more likely to be harassed, hurt, or killed if you're a minister speaking about progress for Black people than if you are a sure enough revolutionary.

— Gil Scott-Heron

“Oftentimes, the way it seems to be is that our artists in particular point themselves out as spokesmen for a certain constituency in a community, and thereby place themselves in that vulnerable position.”

— Gil Scott-Heron

“I don't suspect that in many instances the artists who are dedicated in that fashion to the progress of that community are as well protected by the community as might be necessary.”

— Gil Scott-Heron