When a person only knows abuse, they shift their whole emotional and spiritual life into the context of that abuse. If all you've ever known is to be hurt by the one that pretends to love you, then many times you go to the one who hurts you for love.
Anohni
The top end are still making bucket loads while maintaining the illusion of the American dream: that if you work hard enough, you can make a fortune. Meanwhile, the working and middle classes have been hollowed out of the system.
Women are women, and so are men, and the delusion that we are spiritually separate from or are about to spiritually separate from the rest of existence is a psychosis that spins us into virulence.
Only an intervention by women around the world, with their innate knowledge of interdependency, deep listening, empathy and self-sacrifice, could possibly alter our species' desperate course.
It's a feminine universe, and every person who has ever tried to convince you otherwise is doing little more than pounding on his mother's breast, enraged by the predicament he faces as a leaf, dangling from the tree of life.
The man-made apocalypse we are facing was not written in the stars; it is a notion that grew like mould from the texts of a few frustrated, feather-wielding monks.
Yes, I'm ashamed of my participation as a taxpayer in American drone bombing.
America, a country that is no longer contained by physical borders, aspires only for more power and control. I want to maximize my usefulness and advocate for the preservation of biodiversity and the pursuit of human decency within my sphere of influence.
We're not just polluting a river and killing a couple of top predator animals; we're eradicating the krill, the necessary algae. We're dismantling the insect and amphibian worlds. We're going for the building blocks.
Reality has been so politicized such that people truly believe, mostly, that there are two versions of reality: a conservative and a liberal version. In my mind, there's only one version of reality and then those who lie about it. Much as in a court of law.
I've always been transgender, and I always will be. Having said that, my spirit is feminine. If you had to divide humanity into two groups, I would sit with the women.
In our lifetime, we're going to see fifty percent of the world's species go extinct. We're already seeing this radical rise in the world's temperature that was predicted.
For millennia, men have enslaved women and attempted to appropriate female creative power, re-casting themselves as gods and creators. This assault continues today in the forms of ruthless wealth and mineral extraction, genetic engineering, mass surveillance, and war mongering.
I didn't set out to be a singer. Actually, the earliest creative efforts I made were drawings copied from comics we got every week at the newsagent, or rearranging photos I cut out and pasted in scrapbooks.
America has no real idea of the extent to which it abuses its authority and power.
As a transgendered artist, I have always occupied a place outside of the mainstream. I have gladly paid a price for speaking my truth in the face of loathing and idiocy.
We've been playing in the sandbox of creation for millions of years. We ruin one environment, we move on to the next - manifest destiny. Now it's hitting us collectively: Our mother's life is in our hands.
You see artists hailed as a new generation of independents, only to be enlisted to leverage product.
Hopelessness is a feeling. It's not a fact.
I was never going to become a beautiful, passable woman, and I was never going to be a man. It's a quandary. But the trans condition is a beautiful mystery; it's one of nature's best ideas.
I've always been somewhat uncomfortable on the stage, and I've always felt like physically having to negotiate my own presence as a part of presenting work has always been a source of angst for me.
My favourite moment from the Oscars was when Brando didn't attend and sent a Native American woman to talk about Wounded Knee. She delivered a very unpopular and lengthy monologue about the injustice for indigenous people in North America. It was one of the greatest moments in American television.
Whereas in the past people have seen the two sexes as almost incomprehensibly different, now there is a group of people that are explaining the connections between both the genders, literally in the way their biology informs some of their expression.
Life is short, and there's something to be said for being true to yourself.
Changing my name has been like a formal rite of passage.
What's subcultural now is literally just a line of thinking, which is trying to be eyes wide open, in my view. It's no longer attached to a specific demographic or specifically downtrodden groups of people; it's much more free-floating, and you don't know where you're going to find it.
God - God's the wrong word - goddess or nature will conspire to transform you in a way you couldn't have imagined.
I had this voice when I was in high school, except nobody thought much of it then. I developed it by imitating singers I admired - Alison Moyet, Boy George, later on Nina Simone.
As Donald Trump and his cabinet now demonstrate, the skills encouraged in men by their biologies and the tools that boys master in the playground have not equipped them to deal with the unprecedented global crisis we are now facing.
I spent ten years being told there was no way I was going to have a career because I was so effeminate.
If there are places where I didn't feel comfortable with the particular politics, then I just couldn't do a concert there.
I was drawn to people that were expressing feeling because that was what was taboo in my family, expressing feeling. And that was what I was made of.
More and more - especially the younger generation - are functioning outside the binary concept of gender. That's just next-generation stuff.
We're all just waiting for our sugar lumps. That's how life has been structured for us.
As an artist, you tend to identify your sphere of influence and try to employ that as best you can to hopefully be useful.
Participation in and of itself is an act against hopelessness. Speaking up is a gesture against hopelessness.
I think for me, at the end of the day, just because of who I am, my priority is the biosphere. That seems to be, for me, where I've ended up, and I've been there pretty consistently since I was a teenager.
My idea with '4 Degrees' was to articulate, for a minute, not my ideal vision of how I wanted to perceive my relationship to nature but the reality. If I could give a voice to my behavior, what would that voice be? Taking planes, enjoying first-world fossil fuel, an addict of first-world comfort.
My being bought as a politically outspoken artist is a more potent advertising tool for Apple than a 100 more explicit ads.
If Hillary's the first woman president, well, in England we already know what a Margaret Thatcher is. It's not an end unto itself to be the first woman president.
When we are not extracting wealth from nature, we are extracting it from the working and middle classes.
For me, a theatre is a dark place. It should be mysterious; it's where we go to get away from all the utilitarian things we do in the daylight.
People trust my voice. And my expertise, honestly, is not political science. It's emotion and expression and sort of presence, you know?
Rage is a really fun place to dance from - expressions of anger sublimated into something beautiful are invigorating, especially if you feel like you're telling the truth.
The income streams of musicians have all been upstreamed into the pockets of computer corporations. Sound recordings are little more than free crackerjacks inside every computer or cellphone that you buy.
There have been points in my life as an artist where I have wanted to capture people's attention, probably to compensate for times when I felt invisible.
Artists have different responsibilities in different eras. But at this point, I really feel like it's all hands on deck. An artist that's fiddle-faddling in opaque, gossamer gestures - I mean it's fine to do that, totally fine, but there's no time left. We don't have the luxury of time anymore.
We're still expecting capitalism to solve problems: 'Maybe if we sell enough oil, we can give some profits to an environmental agency!' Capitalism isn't a moral system.
At the end of the day, the sovereignty of maleness is an illusion. In essence and in origin, we are all entirely female.
You need money to have advocacy in America. People that don't have money don't have advocacy.
