Politics & Power Quote by Peter Steele

Steele’s joke lands because it’s half dodge, half confession. “Stay away from politics” reads like the standard celebrity disclaimer, but he immediately undercuts it with an image that’s too bodily, too specific, to be PR. The “size fifteen foot” isn’t just a punchline about being a big guy; it’s a swaggering admission that his opinions arrive unfiltered, heavy, and hard to retract. He’s telling you he’s dangerous to himself in the public square, and he knows it.

The subtext is classic late-20th-century rock ambivalence: politics matters, but the culture punishes musicians for stepping outside their lane. Steele frames the problem not as censorship by “the system” but as his own likelihood of saying the wrong thing. That shifts the humor into something darker: he’s preemptively managing fallout. The mouth-foot metaphor is an old idiom, yet the added measurement makes it personal and slightly grotesque, like Type O Negative’s whole aesthetic - self-mythologizing masculinity used as a shield for vulnerability.

Context matters, too. Steele came up in a scene where provocation was currency, and where interviews often baited artists into hot takes they couldn’t walk back. By presenting politics as a trap he’s physically ill-equipped to navigate, he positions himself as both outsider and unreliable narrator. It’s a permission slip for listeners: don’t demand ideological purity from me, but don’t mistake my silence for neutrality either. The laugh is the point, and so is the warning.