Banksy Quotes

“Some mothers will do anything for their children, except let them be themselves.”

“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”

“Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they're having a piss.”

“You're mind is working at its best when you're being paranoid.
You explore every avenue and possibility of your situation
at high speed with total clarity.”

“It's a very frustrated feeling you get when the only people with good photos of you work are the police department.”

“People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish. But that's only if it's done properly.”

“The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules. It's people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages. As a precaution to ever committing major acts of evil it is our solemn duty never to do what we're told, this is the only way we can be sure.”

“People who should be shot: Fascist thugs, religious fundamentalists, people who write lists telling you who should be shot.”

“If you want to say something and have people listen then you have to
wear a mask. If you want to be honest then you have to live a lie.”

“Nothing in the world is more common than unsuccessful people with talent, leave the house before you find something worth staying in for.”

“I'd been painting rats for three years before someone said 'that's a clever anagram of art' and I had to pretend I'd known that all along.”

“Painting something that defies the law of the land is good. Painting something that defies the law of the land and defies the law of gravity at the same time is really good.”

“Speak softly, but carry a big can of paint.”

“Try to avoid painting in places where they still point at aeroplanes.”

“A lot of people think that scuttling around stenciling images onto buildings in the middle of the night is the action of a sad, frustrated individual who can't get attention or recognition any other way. They might be right, but I've done gallery shows and, if you've been hitting on people with all sorts of images in all sorts of places, they're a real step backwards, painting the streets means becoming an actual part of the city. It's not a spectator sport.”

“All artists are willing to suffer for their work. But why are so few prepared to learn to draw?”

“The holy grail is to spend less time making the picture than it takes people to look at it.”

“There's nothing more dangerous than someone who wants to make the world a better place.”

“Sometimes I feel so sick at the state of the world I can’t even finish my second apple pie.”

“Nothing is black and white, and there is no purity and there is no such thing has justice.”

“You can win the rat race but you're still a rat.”

“There are four basic human needs: food, sleep, sex and revenge.”

“If at first you don't succeed, Call an airstrike.”

“Become good at cheating and you never need to become good at anything else.”

“People either love me or they hate me, or they don't really care.”

“A wall is a very big weapon. It's one of the nastiest things you can hit someone with.”

“If you are dirty, insignificant and unloved then rats are the ultimate role model.”

“Only when the last tree has been cut down and the last river has dried up will man realize that reciting red Indian proverbs makes you sound like a fucking Muppet.”

“As far as I can tell, the only thing worth looking at in most museums of art is all the schoolgirls on day trips with the art department.”

“If you want someone to be ignored, then build a life-size bronze statue of them and stick it in the middle of town…”

“I sucked a lot of breasts to get where I am today.”

“A lot of people never use their initiative because nobody told them to.”

“People who get up early in the morning cause war, death and famine.”

“A recent survey or North American males found 42% were overweight, 34% were critically obese and 8% ate the survey.”

“You owe the companies nothing. You especially don't owe them any courtesy. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.”

“I don't believe in anything. I'm just here for the violence.”

“people who enjoy waving flags don't deserve to have one.”

“I need someone to protect me from all the measures they take in order to protect me.”

“Live as a villain, die as a hero”

“One Original Thought is worth 1000 Meaningless Quotes.”

“Some people represent authority without ever possessing any of their own.”

“I like to think I have the guts to stand up anonymously in a western democracy and call for things no-one else believes in—like peace and justice and freedom.”

“At this time of year it's easy to forget the true meaning of Christianity - the lies, the corruption, the abuse.”

“When the time comes to leave, just walk away quietly and don't make any fuss.”

“Fight the fighters, not their wars.”

“The craft is finding a decent drainpipe to get access to the site as much as it is in the art… Van Gogh used short, stumpy brush strokes to convey his insanity - I use short, thin ledges above mainline train tracks.”

“I've never really understood why people sleep. Wasting a third of your life and becoming vulnerable for almost 8 hours every night. Doesn't seem very appealing to me.”

“There's no way you're going to get a quote from us to use on your book cover.”

“If you have a statue in the city centre you could go past it every day on your way to school and never even notice it, right. But as soon as someone puts a traffic cone on its head, you've made your own sculpture.”

“People seem to think that if they dress like a revolutionary, they don't actually have to behave like one.”

“Be positive, patient and persistent.”

“We can't do anything to change the world until capitalism crumbles. In the meantime we should all go shopping to console ourselves.”

“I got home at last and crawled into bed next to my girlfriend. I told her I'd had an epiphany that night [about using stencils] and she told me to stop taking that drug 'cos it's bad for your heart.”

“The human race is an unfair and stupid competition. A lot of runners don't even get decent sneakers or clean drinking water. Some runners are born with a massive head start, every possible help along the way and still the referees seem to be on their side. It's not surprising a lot of people have given up competing altogether and gone to sit in the grandstand, eat junk food and shout abuse. What we need in this race is a lot more streakers.”

“[I first picked up a spray can] the day someone ram-raided the Halfords round the corner from our house.”

“The Art we look at is made by only a select few. A small group create, promote, purchase, exhibit and decide the success of Art. Only a few hundred people in the world have any real say. When you go to an Art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires…”

“The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.”

“Art is not like other culture because its success is not made by its audience. The public fill concert halls and cinemas everyday, we read novels by the millions, and buy records by the billions. 'We the people' affect the making and quality of most of our culture, but not our art.”

“Writing graffiti is about the most honest way you can be an artist. It takes no money to do it, you don't need an education to understand it and there's no admission fee.”

“T. V. has made going to the theatre seem pointless, photography has pretty much killed painting but graffiti has remained gloriously unspoilt by progress.”

“Conversations don't get any better as you get older.”

“I used to tell everyone I meant to be an artist….. I don't do that any more.”

“We don’t need any more heroes; we just need someone to take out the recycling.”

“I pretty much use sketchbooks to note down great ideas of somebody else I've just had. A good sketchbook means you don't actually need to bother with having a memory yourself. You can get away with a fair bit of substance abuse if you always carry a notepad and a sharp pencil around with you.”

“When the paintings suddenly started going for, like, really big money it definitely weirded me out, and I kind of went away to the middle of nowhere and I stopped making any more paintings. But the whole time the auction houses were just selling paintings that I’d done years before and sold for not much money. Or paintings that I traded for a haircut or, you know, an ounce of weed and they were going for like 50 grand.”

“Nearly a hundred pictures are featured here. Each and every one of them a pathetic cry for help.”