Prodigy Quotes

I understand that Detroit was a pretty rough place to grow up in the '70s and '80s.

Some people see Baltimore as a hopeless place. Some have even made a lot of money on it.

What too few people mention when discussing crime is the degree to which concentrated poverty, hopelessness and despair are the chambermaids of violence and incivility.

I don't know where people think I'm from, but I'm from Chicago. It's really just that. People wanna romanticize it and say, 'There's two sides to it, and it's a beautiful love/hate story of violence and music.' But it's really just a very scummy place where people don't have respect for other people's lives.

Tonight the city is full of morgues, and all the toilets are overflowing. There's shopping malls coming out of the walls, as we walk out among the manure. That's why I pay no mind.

The Five Points was the toughest street corner in the world. That's how it was known. In fact, Charles Dickens visited it in the 1850s and he said it was worse than anything he'd seen in the East End of London.

When I was growing up there, North Gulfport was referred to as 'Little Vietnam' because of the perception of crime and depravity within its borders - as if its denizens were simply a congregation of the downtrodden.

There are people in whole parts of our cities who are being totally left behind and disregarded. They are unheard. They are told they are unneeded by this economy. And that extreme poverty breeds conditions for extreme violence.

If you don't visit the bad neighborhoods, the bad neighborhoods are going to visit you.

Knife crime and gun crime is poverty-driven, and poverty leads to insecurity.

I've been in many of them and to some extent I would have to say this; if you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

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

Baltimore is a goddamn ghetto. It's worse than Washington. It is shit.

Behind every locked door on Skid Road are a thousand stories.

You can live an entire lifetime in Chicago and not hear a gunshot, but if you go in a certain neighborhood then you can live your whole lifetime hearing gunshots all the time.

New Orleans is a great place, a place of celebration. But on the other hand, there's a reality to it, there's violence, there's misguided youth.

Here are the ingredients of a tragedy: untreated mental illness, a society where life is cheap and crime is glamorized, and a ready supply of firearms.

When it comes to Baltimore I want to say that it's actually a lot worse than what you see in 'The Wire.'

New York City isn't Chuck E. Cheese. We don't have ball pits for the kids to play in. We have titty bars and crack.

Currently, it was leading him through a neighborhood that was on the downside of whatever curve you hoped you'd bought your property on the upside of. Graffiti and garbage were everywhere here. They were everywhere in the city, if it came to that, but elsewhere the garbage was better quality, and the graffiti was close to being correctly spelled. The whole area was waiting for something to happen, like a really bad fire.

New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves... A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness. Meaningless. Absolute meaningless.

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 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?

War is not the only form of violence imposed on people through inadequate social arrangements. There is also hunger, poverty and scarcity. The use of money and the creation of debt fosters economic insecurity, which perpetuates crime, lawlessness and resentment. Paper proclamations and treaties do not alter the facts of scarcity and insecurity, and nationalism tends only to propagate the separation of nations and the world's people.

In railway halls, on pavements near the traffic, They beg, their eyes made big by empty staring And only measuring Time , like the blank clock. No, I shall weave no tracery of pen-ornament To make them birds upon my singing tree: Time merely drives these lives which do not live As tides push rotten stuff along the shore.