JPEGMAFIA Quotes

Where I come from, the estates are not so nice. It is a bit gritty.

When ghetto living seems normal, you have no shame, no privacy.

I don't know where people think I'm from, but I'm from Chicago. It's really just that. People wanna romanticize it and say, 'There's two sides to it, and it's a beautiful love/hate story of violence and music.' But it's really just a very scummy place where people don't have respect for other people's lives.

Poverty causes crime.

It certainly should not surprise us that a young person without any real stake in a legitimate occupation or career may get into trouble more easily. Such persons readily accept the idea that they have been unjustly deprived of money, status, and opportunity.

Growing up in Flint, Michigan, I saw so many kids from my school end up in jail or unemployed, and gangs would hang out and cause trouble in my neighborhood. I had to learn how to protect myself, because it didn't feel like anyone else was protecting me.

A short distance away from thriving city centres in virtually all of our cities, you will find areas of endemic worklessness, alienation, crime and antisocial behaviour.

Many of the young people living in inner-city America don't see themselves - I mean, they even talk about things like death and dying. And there's a tremendous loss of hope. And of all the things to lose, I think nothing is worse or more difficult to overcome than the loss of hope.

Those who remember New York in the 1970s, as I do, look back on a city that had hit a very rough patch - decaying, bankrupt, and crime-ridden. But fun.

The year the bus drivers went on strike in Pittsburgh, I was twenty-three and living on the edge of the city in a neighborhood that was on the verge of becoming a ghetto. I had just been fired from a good job as a cartographer in a design studio where I had worked for about four months.

The attitude in Baltimore in 1999 was almost one of resignation, that our problems were bigger than our capacity to handle them.

We are living in the excesses of freedom. Just take a look at 42nd Street and Broadway.

Now we just showin' and provin' that there's a ghetto everywhere you go.

Los Angeles, I don't like that town. Too decadent, and it's slimy.

If you are a junkyard dog, you assume that that's what life is: chained up, barking all day.

Poverty leads to hardship and failure.

Juarez had become a failed city. The mayor of Juarez lived in El Paso. Not only did he not live in his own city, he didn't live in his own country. You had all these kids out of school who didn't want to work because they saw their mothers toiling in jobs for hardly any cash.

The youth of Taiwan not only have to face the harsh reality of low wages and high commodity and housing prices, but due to the lack of employment opportunities, many young people are forced to leave their home towns to search for jobs in the cities.

I was born and raised in the ghetto, on welfare, two minutes from homeless.

They [poor youth] don't have any respect for the property of others because they don't have any property.

Poverty demoralizes.

Baltimore is a goddamn ghetto. It's worse than Washington. It is shit.

You have to understand - I come from a neighborhood where 'The Wire' was filmed.

In a lot of ways, New York isn't the city I moved to back in 1979. I'm old enough to separate my nostalgia for those days from the reality of how dangerous and uncertain they could be.

How real can your music be if you wake up in the morning hearing birds and crickets? I never hear birds when I wake up. Just a lot of construction work, the smell of Chinese takeout, children screaming, and everybody knocking a different track from 'Ready to Die' as they pass down the street.