Jimmy Cliff Quotes

I grew up on 135th Street. I grew up on the poor side of New York. I grew up in Harlem.

When I grew up, I lived in a neighborhood that had social clubs. It's never delightful to glamorize one's youth. My neighborhood was poor. But people felt part of the neighborhood. This was in Rockaway Beach, Long Island.

If I could help every ghetto, I would.

I just thought everybody lived around abandoned buildings and crack-heads, ... I lived in the ghetto until I was like 19. I came to Los Angeles, stayed at hotels and stuff. When I got back and I saw what my neighborhood looked like, I started getting scared.

I was in the heart and soul of Baltimore. I definitely felt a connection to the people. They're really hard-working people that want to have a better life. And I saw the struggle that exists there.

I was brought up in this part of Detroit that they used to call the ghetto.

I'm from Long Beach - not the best area in the world - and I had a lot of ghetto friends growing up.

Jamaica full of ghetto, but boy, I tell you: me never see it like that.

Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.

I graduated from Bowdoin College and went to the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Then I left and took a job teaching really poor inner-city white kids in Boston. It was interesting to me because I'd never been around poor whites before.

To me, I'm the epitome of what a ghetto child is: I was raised by a single parent; I stayed in apartments my whole life; I don't think I've ever cut the grass.

If you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

When you say you grew up in Los Angeles, a lot of people think the west side: they think the glitz and all this stuff that I actually had no relationship to growing up.

I'm from Harlem, born and raised there.

I'm from the inner city of Buffalo.

I am from the ghetto.

Why 'Do Bronx'? Because I'm from the slums, those are my roots.

Everyone knows I'm very close to my family, my hometown, my homeland.

I was in Vancouver, and I was in what I was told was the poorest neighborhood in North America - which I find very hard to believe because has anyone here ever been to Detroit?

Now some folks say that we should be glad for what we have. Tell me, would you be happy in Village Ghetto Land?

Many people in Harlem never go out of Harlem. I mean they'd never even been downtown. And you can see how this bitterness can accumulate. Here you see people crowded and hovered up in ghettos and slums with no hope.They see no way out.

I have a friend whose theory is that you're from wherever you went to high school. I think that's mostly true.

I'll tell you what, our inner cities are so, so bad right now. The danger, the crime, the lack of education, no jobs. African Americans are living in hell in our - in the inner cities. I mean, they're living - they're living in hell. You walk to the store for a loaf of bread; you get shot.

I may have left Liverpool but the city and club will always be part of me.

The skyline is etched in my veins. You can never put that out, no matter how hard it rains.