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Name: Tom Morello Band: Rage Against The Machine Position Guitar Date Of Birth May 30th, 1964 Place Of Birth New York City Sex Male Official Site: RATM Fan Site: RATM.ORG Fan Site: Rage Page Fan Site: Evil Empire Fan Site: Morello Fanlisting Fan Site: Fan Site

-"A good song should make you wanna tap your foot and get with your girl. A great song should destroy cops and set fire to the suburbs. I'm only interested in writing great songs."


-"The only bad "f-word" is FCC."


-"I've always been on a personal mission to save the guitar."


-"I'm always excited about making music with Rage Against the Machine. Honestly, I think we've just scratched the surface of what we can do creatively."


-"For the millennium, you really have a choice to make. You either have to be naked with your head on fire and a shotgun in Bali or else you have to spend time with friends or family around the fireplace. And I'm choosing option B"


-"That's part of the job! There's a long, rich and savage history of dissidents in the United States being persecuted by law enforcement, so it's something we take for granted. But the second that you find the police department and government agencies patting you on the back and telling you to 'keep up the good work', that's when you break up the band."


-"We figured that since they weren't busy serving and protecting the community, which our tax dollars pay for, then they should at least be well fed. So we sent them 300 Krispy Kreme donuts."


-"Things like rebellion and resistance to authority are absolutely as much a part of the human experience as love and cars are, and it's a part that doesn't get covered very much in pop music."


-"This is a very unlikely tour package to be playing in venues this size. You've got Wu-Tang Clan, like the least commercial, least radio friendly, most raw hip-hop group on the planet, who also, coincidentally, has the number one album, and then Rage Against The Machine, whose politics make Ralph Nader look like Ghengis Khan."


-"I just finished reading Noam Chomsky's biography, and among books I've taken I got one specially for Israel. A book that will give me some Info and understanding of some of the places we'll visit. It's called the "Bible"."


-"Of course, music is an art form, and it's not all that competitive. But we don't ever intend to be the second-best band on a stage at any show."


-"In my own way, I was a rebellious kid."


-"This will be our final conduction of the afternoon..."


-"It’s not at all the case where our audiences are empty glasses that we pour knowledge in. I think that Rage Against the Machine fans are for the most part pretty intelligent, and a lot of them are pretty pissed off and have got their own ideas."


-"As Zack would point out on stage, it's obvious that the Order weren't afraid of our band or our music. They were afraid of our audience, that people might be listening. That's why they tried to boycott Rage Against the Machine. And their boycott was an abject failure."


-"I think we're way better than we've ever been, and there's no reason why the next record can't top even 'The Battle of Los Angeles'."


-"I am enormously proud to be an American. I would say that the things that our corporate-controlled government has done at best are shameful and at worst genocidal-but there's an incredible and a permanent culture of resistance in this country that I'm very proud to be a part of. It's not the tradition of slave-owningfounding fathers, it's the tradition of the Frederick Douglasses, the Underground Railroads, the Chief Josephs, the Joe Hills, and the Huey P. Newtons. There's so much to be proud of when you're American that's hidden from you. The incredible courage and bravery of the union organizers in the late 1800's and early 1900's-that's amazing. People of get tricked into going overseas and fighting Uncle Sam's Wall Street wars, but these are people who knew what they were fighting for here at home. I think that that's so much more courageous and brave."


          -Tom Morello, Rage Against The Machine, Guitar, May 30th, 1964