Talib Kweli Quotes - Page 2

If lyrics sold then truth be told/I'd probably be just as rich and famous as Jay-Z.

I'm at a loss for words. But even my loss is amplified.

I think once you're in the public eye, whether you're a boss, a teacher or whatever you do, that you're automatically in the position of role model. You have people looking up to you, so whether you choose to accept it or not is a different question.

I'm not looking to set a standard... but, I believe I have offered a challenge to others with my work.

When I was a teenager, the way some of these kids out here be actively gay, it would have been ridiculed in the hood. And now the hood is a bit more accepting. Begrudgingly accepting, but definitely more accepting than 20 years ago when I was a little kid. That doesn't mean that anybody should stop fighting for equality just because people are begrudgingly a little more accepting.

War is not civilized.

You gotta eat right, you gotta have healthy habits, you know, and balance out your decadence with a healthy lifestyle during the day.

My fondest memories were watching the Beastie Boys get prepped to come on stage. They had a lot of antics and they play a lot of basketball... then they were giving out cameras to the crowd, and performing from the bleachers. The most important thing I learned was that you control your crowd, not the other way around.

I'm not an artist that has a big, huge radio record that's going to be on BET. I'm not, at this point, gunning for like, "Oh, I'm gonna kill them in the first week." But as people slowly discover the album they realize it's better than a lot of what they've been listening to all year.

You have to know when to be arrogant. You have to when to be humble. You have to know when to be hard and you have to know when to be soft.

The responsibility of an artist is to be honest with themselves.

I don't care if Rick Ross is 40 years old -- he's a misguided 40-year-old person.

There just needs to be a gay rapper who's better than everybody. That's when that question will no longer be able to be asked.

I think hip hop is a dance music that's rebellious by nature.

The problem with our role is Americans live in a world of illusion.

Consider me the entity within the industry without a history of spitting the epitome of stupidity.

My musical influence is really from my father. He was a DJ in college. My parents met at New York University. So he listened to, you know, Motown, and he listened to Bob Dylan. He listened to Grateful Dead and Rolling Stones, but he also listened to reggae music. And he collected vinyl.

We send young white boys to the Army. We're sending young black boys to the prisons.

So I think hip-hop is moving and is going to continue to move in the direction of rappers just being honest with themselves, whether you're talking about Common and Mos Def or Nas and 50 cent.

I have such respect for the art of deejaying. I hesitate to even call myself a deejay.

I think all those artists are artists who are appreciated because you believe their words and you appreciate their honesty in their music. If you don't appreciate the honesty in the music, the beat can be fly as hell but you'll never give an emcee props.

They hope for the Apocalypse like a self-fulfilling prophecy Tell me when do we stop it? Do they ask you your religion before you rent an apartment? Is the answer burning Korans so that we can defend Islamics?

Hip hop is at its essence a folk music, because it speaks the language that people are still speaking at ground zero, it speaks the language that people speak on the streets.

What else is stop and frisk? These neighborhoods are unsafe not because there's not enough cops illegally frisking people. They're not safe because of economic conditions. They're not safe because of all types of things in the government that people like Mike Bloomberg and Ray Kelly should be looking to fix instead of randomly searching kids in the hood. If you go to a college campus and you do stop and frisk, you're going to find a lot of drugs there, too.

It’s very seductive to focus on what you don’t like as opposed to celebrating all that it is that you do.