Richard Helms Quotes

I'm tired of seeing people dying every day; I'm tired of seeing people go to jail for nothing.

You grow up in America and you're told from day one, 'This is the land of opportunity.' That everybody has an equal chance to make it in this country. And then you look at places like Harlem, and you say, 'That is absolutely a lie.'

I guess I'm struck all the time by how outrageously wrong life is. There are times I can't stand to read the newspapers. It makes me insane.

The poor and minorities are disproportionately both crime's perpetrators and its victims. People are saddened when this happens but not surprised.

We should not have drug laws or a court system that disproportionately punishes the black community.

Most of today's black convicts have come to understand that they are the most abused victims of an unrighteous order.

Our criminal justice system affirmatively depends on inequality.

Too many things that happen in this country give the impression that our system is blind in the right eye.

I look at the Supreme Court and know why Jesus wept.

Black and brown communities are significantly and disproportionately impacted by deficiencies in our criminal justice system.

I know what it's like to think the system has left you behind.

The whole reason behind my album 'Free TC' is seeing all that police brutality, injustice, mass incarceration.

As African-Americans, that's what's being played fast and loose with, our citizenship. When you have the Trayvon Martins and the Michael Browns being shot and killed, it's because, on a certain level, there is a kind of mutability in the understanding of citizenship around the black body.

Thug Life to me is dead.

Black-on-black crime is a massive human rights issue that's going on in America.

I feel like my work has been my path to freedom from having grown up in a segregated environment.

Many are observing Ferguson and witnessing the anger, demonstrations, looting and vandalism and calling for quiet. But quiet isn't enough. The absence of noise isn't the presence of justice - and we must demand justice in Ferguson and the other 'Fergusons' around America.

If I wanted to develop a scenario to destroy America, I would do what the Republicans are doing. Take the brightest and best young black men off the streets, put them in jail, make them meaner than hell for 8 or 10 years and then turn them lose in a society where there are plenty of guns for them to play with.

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.

I grew up here, and it's always been a very diverse community. So for people to come out and say that there's some long-standing anger or there's a history of racial tension is absolutely ridiculous. There's not a black-white divide in Ferguson.

Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I'm angry about bankers. About the government.

Well you know, all law is about injustice.

There's tons of people with talent; it's the system that's all screwed up.

Yes, disappointment over perceived unfairness, injustice, promises not kept, tends to go hand in hand with increasing prosperity. Expectations are dashed. What can I say!

On stage, I find anger at the unfairness of the world easily.