Killer Mike Quotes

I learned about community organizing from my parents. As a child, their stories were so instructive.

I've been in the newspapers since I was about 15 - not for rapping, but for real substantive stuff I was doing in the community, organizing around gang violence in the schools. So I had already made my grandma proud before I was on TV. I've always been who I am.

I'm so proud of who I am and where I come from and who my father is.

I grew up in Los Angeles in a Quaker family, and for me being Quaker was a political calling rather than a religious one.

Public service is a part of who I am, having grown up in a family of politicians.

There were never any doctors in my family. But my grandparents and my mother had a strong social conscience that was formative.

I was brought up in a family of journalists, and a mother who was deeply committed to human rights, so I think that the mix of those two huge influences have been very, very important to me.

Public service and community organizing and movement building is such a part of my DNA that it's really hard to separate it.

I was very engaged in my communities throughout college, but I never thought of it as political.

Beyond being a footballer, I am a citizen.

It's unfortunate that some people do not see what entertainers do in the background, but many of us do so much work with causes. You know some people have chewed me out, saying things like, "Oh why could you post pictures in your dresses and meanwhile they killing black men on the street?" I'm thinking, excuse me do you know what I did today? Do you know what I'm doing right now while I'm reading this post? So I think a lot of celebrities get a bad rap because people see the surface.

Families are incubators for citizen activists.

I was very fortunate to have known Fred Ross Sr., who was organizing the Community Service Organization (CSO) way back in the late 50's and early 60's. I was able to work with him.

Man must have some recognized stake in society and affairs to knit him lovingly to his kind, or he is wont to revenge himself for wrongs real or imagined.

I grew up in a very religious family, so that was never going to leave me. I just accepted it over the years. Although I'm not religious myself, it is so much a part of me. It's a part of my history, a part of my tradition and my culture, so I don't want to just throw it away and leave it behind, because it's made me who I am today.

I came here with something in me that I inherited from my folks. So I'm going to do something called life and times.

The real problem is not the bad guys; it is that good guys have gone to sleep.

Essentially, I'm a very real person; good and bad. And the public image is one of being very good, I suppose. But one of the reasons I'm attracted to people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Christ, to pacifism, is because naturally, I'm the guy that would not turn the other cheek - but, when people see you're attracted to that, they think you are that.

didn't come from a particularly political family. My parents were regular voters. My parents didn't make enough money to contribute to campaigns, and they didn't really knock on doors for candidates when I was growing up.

The example my parents set, both in and outside of our household, helped me understand that we all have a specific purpose in life--to give back to society.

I never wanted to be a wild kid. I respected my parents and I had great friends. I was lucky. We did a lot of church activities. There were the bad kids in school who partied all the time, but none of my close friends did.

People on a spiritual path - personal growth, spiritual practice, recovery, yoga and so forth - are the last people who should be sitting out the social and political issues of our day. And there’s an important reason for this: People on such journeys are adepts at change. They know that the mechanics of the heart and mind are the fundamental drivers of transformation.

Americans of good-will, the nice decent church people, the well-meaning liberals, the good hearted souls who themselves wouldn't lynch anyone, must begin to realize that they have to be more than passively good-hearted, more than church goingly Christian, and much more than word-of-mouth in the liberalism.

I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.

One of the great movements in my lifetime among educated people is the need to commit themselves to action. Most people are not satisfied with giving money; we also feel we need to work.