Ice Cube Quotes - Page 7

Usually people who attack the rap are people who aren't even fans.

I always tell people that if you gave me a pen and a piece of paper when I was a teenager and said, "Write out how you'd like your career to go," I would have probably short changed myself compared to what it's been for real. I'm just extremely excited about what I've accomplished.

When you have a good movie, it's hard to categorize it. It's everything. It makes you laugh, makes you cry and makes you think.

If you really think back to the culture or just black America before rap music took off, New York could have been Paris.

For me rappers and dancers are poets and artists and often times the most interesting performances are given by them.

The police don't look at you as long when they drive past. Sometimes they don't look at you at all. In South Central, you've got them looking and lurking. I think it's basic harassment. It's part of their tactics to have everybody nervous of them. In the valley, at least I don't feel it the same way.

I think rap music is brought up, gangster rap in particular, as well as video games, every other thing they try to hang the ills of society on as a scapegoat.

Go down to the corner store and beat the Jap up, clean all the crap up.

It's funny how people who ain't never been down there can think that America is so fair and that we should be alright. It's funny that the people who have their foot on our neck are telling us, 'Get up. What's wrong with you?'

Well, for the transition from rapper to actor, I was fortunate that director John Singleton pursued me for about two years to be in Boyz 'N the Hood. I really wasn't even thinking about acting at the time, since I was singularly focused on being the best rapper in the world. So, that was really a blessing, because I wasn't really taking him seriously.

There's not enough Ice Cubes out there. There's not enough Ice Cubes getting a chance to do their thing.

Once you figure out what your own thing is it's all about trying to develop shows, programs that can, I guess, enhance what you already have and what you can add to Hollywood.

When I did 'Boyz N The Hood', I never thought how we grew up in South Central was interesting enough for a movie.

I get freedom out of hip-hop. I get to be a true artist without any shackles or harnesses.

They thought we were just basically keeping ourselves underground on purpose. And it was just strange for people to approach music that way. And for rap, trying to get recognition, and be seen as a regular form of music like anything else. I mean, the Soul, R&B, Rock 'N Roll, they would dis the hell out of rap when it first came out.

People associate clothes with actual behavior, and it's kind of crazy. If you get shot in some Levi's you don't go after Levi's. It's not the clothes. It's always the people.

Run DMC brought us out of that underground-only feel. They brought rap above ground and made it respectable as an art form to mainstream music.

The '80s was brand new. It was AIDS. It was gangbanging. It was starting to become big dope-dealing, and crack was starting to flood the neighborhoods. And then you had hip hop, which was something new, other than what we were doing, which was sports, playing football, basketball, baseball. And I was excited.

I’m a B-boy at heart. I still like rhyming. It’s just the radio game is like Chinese arithmetic. It’s hard to know what nuts to crack. But I still love music, been dropping music. Never stopped really.

You the devil in drag. You can burn your cross, Well, I'll burn your flag.

My thing is, I know kids cuss, they do their thing, but I tell my kids, 'Don't do it in earshot of any adults, or you're in trouble.'

Obama reminds me of the black kid at a white school that don't nobody want to play with.

"Are We There Yet?" was the perfect title, because it's such a common saying. And having made the movie with the same name kinda locks it all in.

Rap is always evolving. It's easy for the old school to hate the new school, but it's a music that got a little stifled I think, by the Internet a little bit.

I've done movies for certain reasons; I did 'Anaconda' because the black man lives. Simple. The black man isn't dead in the first three pages, like Jurassic Park. It's like, 'The black man kills the snake with a Latino girl? Damn! I got to do this.'