Raekwon Quotes

I would challenge more hip hop artists that are rapping about what it's like to be real and the social ills that we face, if you aren't backing Bernie Sanders, I have to question your credibility in terms of do you mean the songs you're writing.

Hip-hop is a voice for voiceless poor people.

November is Hip-Hop History Month, where we give celebration to what hip hop has done to bring together people of the world, people of all nationalities, young people, all the political systems and politicians on the planet.

The roots of my music start from the ghetto.

I'm not quite sure precisely when social and political activism became a visible brand of my DNA, but it seems to me that I was born into it. It is hard to be born into the experience in the world of poverty and not develop some instinct for survival and resistance to those things that oppress you.

I'm going to make my own 'Trapped In The Closet' one day, about a black kid growing up in the hood.

The Labour party is mainly full of amazing people who care so much about equality and social justice they are probably a bit of a bore at a family do.

Jazz came from the streets, hip-hop came from the streets. It's just a different language. It's all borne out of hard times, struggle, and the fight to have equality and things be better.

I rap when I'm rich. I rap when I'm broke. I rap when I'm bullshit in the street. I rap about only having one woman now. If you can look at a continuum of my career, it's been an evolution of a real dude. So when I say I take my wife to the strip club, we're there, at the five-dollar joint. More than anything, I want people to take away that I'm not mainstream act.

Toni Morrison is challenged regularly because she is a black author who writes about the real world. She speaks with so much knowledge about black issues she can't be accused of creating these (issues). People find these issues threatening.

You could name practically any problem in the hood and there'd be a rap song for you.

I rap for listeners, blunt heads, fly ladies and prisoners

I can't give up. It's a rap thang. And I ain't goin back to the crack game.

Hell no / I ain't going to go / Clean out my cell / And take my tail / To jail / Without bail / Because it's better there eating / Watching television fed / Than in Vietnam with your white folks dead.

A lot of people have that story that they used to sell crack or shoot people; that's nothing new. But honestly, if that was me, I probably still wouldn't be doing that because it's so many people that's doing that. It just gets old when you hear a million raps about how many ways I could shoot you. So I just try to be more creative and come with something new because I actually care about the music.

I should think that people would be more interested in politics and all that is happening, rather than two lovebirds who are looking to wed. I think it's very nice that in an age when love is so scarce that people are willing to gamble on getting married.

This is an issue that has an exceedingly high number of threads in it. It involves race, it involves culture, it involves crime, it involves justice.

I'M HOPELESS, because I've lived long enough to expect things like this to continue to happen. I'm not surprised and at some point my little children are going to inherit the weight of being a minority and all that it entails.

Rap music came along and saved my life. I started to tell the stories of the streets and that was my way out.

While law-abiding Muslims are forced to hide in their homes, and animal-rights activists are labeled as terrorists for undercover filming of abusive treatment at factory farms, right-wing hate groups are free to organize, parade, arm themselves to the hilt and murder with chilling regularity. It’s time for our society to confront this very real threat.

At the beginning of this marvelous era it was natural to expect, and it was expected, that laborsaving inventions would lighten the toil and improve the condition of the laborer; that the enormous increase in the power of producing wealth would make real poverty a thing of the past... From Progress and Poverty, To those who, seeing the vice and misery that spring from the unequal distribution of wealth and privilege, feel the possibility of a higher social state and would strive for its attainment.