will.i.am Quotes

I've never been in a gang. None of my friends have been in a gang. I've never rolled around with big entourages.

What people don't understand is joining a gang ain't bad, it's cool, it's fine. When you in the hood, joining a gang it's cool because all your friends are in the gang, all your family's in the gang. We're not just killing people every night, we're just hanging out, having a good time.

When you're in a gang, you go through life like any other individual. You have certain obligations, but you are not forced to do anything.

People have to see that there is a high degree of complexity about belonging to a gang. It's a symptom, not a problem.

We will not rest until being a gang member is a miserable, undesirable life.

I wanted the attention I missed at home, so I became the leader of a gang. That way, I got attention and was recognized as being important. It wasn't a bad gang - you know, in poor districts in New York, there's a gang to every block. We never robbed at the point of a gun; we'd steal potatoes from a grocery store, or crackers.

I was in middle school right around the time the Bloods and the Crips started taking root in Compton and a lot of the other neighborhoods around me. I saw way too many of my peers - smart, kind, good kids - who got drawn into gangs and violence, and their futures were going to be forever scarred by that.

I think 98% of gang members in Los Angeles would agree that being a gang is just like being part of a community.

I was raised inside the gang culture.

Me, myself, I was a part of gang bangin', you know what I'm sayin'?

What a lot of people don't realize about gangs, in my opinion, is that a gang is not there to attack you. Eighty percent of the people in a gang are there to stop anyone from attacking them. You join a gang for protection, not to go out and hit someone.

While my cousins were gang-banging, I was trying to learn what the Internet was about.

We ought not to demonize a single gang member, and we ought not to romanticize a single gang.

I was a gang leader. Although, it was a gang for defensive purposes. It was not a gang to sell drugs.

Gangs have evolved. The stereotypical gang member covered in tattoos and wearing colors does not really exist any more. There's this fear that it could be any kid, but by any kid, that means any Latino kid.

Anyone who knows gangs knows that lawmakers cannot conceive of a law that would lead a hard-core gang member to 'think twice.'

The truth is that those who join gangs - more often than not they are young men in their later teens - often do come from the most difficult family backgrounds, from an environment where they feel neglected and unwanted. Gang membership can bring a perverse sense of belonging which they may not have ever got at home.

Gangs are a part of living in Los Angeles, but you can exist in Inglewood or Culver City or anywhere else, without joining one.

If we grow up in these communities where we have gangs, well, what do you think we're going to belong to? That's what happened to me and what's still happening to hundreds of thousands of other individuals.

Some of my friends were gang-affiliated or gang-related, but that was just the way things were. I was lucky because football kept me busy and away from that bad path, to an extent.

My family had been involved in gangs since the 1970s.

I lived the street life for a minute; I lost a lot of friends.

When I was young, running with a gang was a cool thing to do; that's how you get popular; that's how you get the girls.

People don't understand that where I come from, everyone is either a convict, been in jail, been in a gang, is a hooligan of some sorts, but those are my brothers, my family and the people that I travel with. Those are the people that I roll with.

I'm not a gangster, bro.