The Notorious B.I.G. Quotes

I bought a lot of rubbish things that kids buy: skateboards and clothes and typical teenage stuff. And, as soon as I could, I wasted a lot of money on cars - BMW's mostly - for myself and my family.

There's always going to be someone with a bigger toy than yours.

At school, when everyone would sell sweets and chocolate, I'd always take it that step further. I'd hustle as hard as I could to get the new Air Forces, to go and chill with the posh kids and the white girls who were around my area.

That's a thing you most look forward to as a kid. The newest clothes or the newest shoes. Definitely getting the newest shoes and bragging to your friends about it.

The way I was raised, you get a new pair of sneakers when the old one gets messed up. But when I got to high school, I started dating girls and trying to fit in, and I realized everybody was collecting Jordans. When I would get my paychecks, I wouldn't even take money. I would just trade them for sneakers.

Some people, of course, can be happier with the cars, the fancy threads, the hilltop mansion, and the other status symbols of 'having made it', but I found that several of my most prized possessions were slipping away, despite all the fortune I had amassed.

Much of the pressure contemporary parents feel with respect to dressing children in designer clothes, teaching young children academics, and giving them instruction in sports derives directly from our need to use our children to impress others with our economic surplus. We find "good" rather than real reasons for letting our children go along with the crowd.

Most of my subject matter was all kind of, like, party stuff, jewelry and cars. It was really just, you know, shallow.

[We are] persuaded to spend money we don't have on things we don't need to create impressions that won't last on people we don't care about.

With their tinted windows up, the cars of the rich go like dark eggs down the roads of Delhi. Every now and then an egg will crack open a woman's hand, dazzling with gold bangles, stretches out an open window, flings an empty mineral water bottle onto the road and then the window goes up, and the egg is resealed.

I envied women with signature hair-dos, signature perfumes, signature sign-offs. Novelists who tell Vogue Magazine: “I can’t live without my Smythson notebook, Pomegranate Noir cologne by Jo Malone and Frette sheets”. In the grip of madness, materialism begins to look like an admirable belief system.

There's a lot of music nowadays with people singing about how amazing their clothes are and how incredible their shoes are and how much jewelry they might be wearing or how much jewelry they want, how much money they have and the club that they're in and the alcohol that they're drinking. I think that's showing off. I don't think it's necessarily all that honest or all that interesting.

I'm convinced no one actually likes clubs. It's a conspiracy. We've been told they're cool and fun; that only "saddoes" dislike them. And no one in our pathetic little pre-apocalyptic timebubble wants to be labelled "sad" - it's like being officially declared worthless by the state. So we muster a grin and go out on the town in our millions.

Pride is as loud a beggar as want, and a great deal more saucy. When you have bought one fine thing, you must buy ten more, that your appearance may be all of a piece; but it is easier to suppress the first desire than to satisfy all that follow it.

Oh, Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz - My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.

But even our pleasures are calculated and business like. We measure our enjoyments by the sum expended. Our salons are often little better than bazaars of fashion.

We live in a highly competitive society, each of us trying to outdo the other in wealth, in popularity or social prestige, in dress, in scholastic grades or golf scores. One is often tempted to say that conflict, rather than cooperation, is the great governing principle of human life.

My mama couldn't give me what I wanted. I had all right clothes, but the people I was with had better clothes. I felt that I had to have better clothes.

I bought a Hummer before I bought a house, and then I bought a house. Every year, everything doubled. The work was doubling. The money was doubling. The popularity was doubling.

How easily we get trapped in that which is not essential - in looking good, winning at competition, gathering power and wealth - when simply being alive is the gift beyond measure.

It is partly to avoid consciousness of greed that we prefer to associate with those who are at least as greedy as we ourselves. Those who consume much less are a reproach.

I wasn't big in the party scene but I did have an excessive lifestyle. I had much more than I needed. I think that was a manifestation of a certain kind of mental illness.

In a monetary system, most of us live near our work with a house, car, and lifestyle we can afford (or, all too often, cannot afford), rather than the one we prefer. We are only as free as our purchasing power permits. Even many wealthy people today select a residence mainly to impress others with their status. Lacking a true sense of self worth, many live to impress others.

In a society dominated by the fact of commercial competition, money is necessarily the test of prowess, and wastefulness the sole criterion of power.