Rakim Quotes

You could go to Estonia and there's probably an episode of 'Seinfeld' playing there. Television is a very powerful thing.

There is a huge sense of loneliness as people leave villages and move to cities. It's hard to find that human connection as you move away from where you started.

I lived in Koreatown for five years, and I lived blocks away from about seven karaoke bars.

I think mobility is very important, not only to discover opportunities elsewhere but at times, also to appreciate better what your home town has. Allahabad, for instance, has the feel of a small, tightly-knit community where everyone participates.

Coming out of college, back to New York, where I didn't really know that many people, I thought our world was very atomized.

I've stayed away from the actual L.A. scene for most of my life.

I've just been very interested in the living side of Washington, rather than the federal side, since I was a kid.

I have grown up in a small city where watching TV is a ritual and Balaji has defined TV in so many ways.

I walked around the block twice, passed 200 people and failed to see a human being.

It was in Cihangir that i first learned Istanbul was not an anonymous multitude of walled-in lives - a jungle of apartments where no one knew who was dead or who was celebrating what - but an archipelago of neighbourhoods in which everyone knew each other.

The people of Baltimore are great. I love Baltimore. What I looked forward to, every year, was getting a new apartment in a different part of town and hanging out. People started to see you in the character that you were, so everyone thought I was real police.

Strangers are an endangered species.

I'm just happy our nations are on the same page of keeping shitty reality TV on the air. Small world!

Those type of people [in New Orleans] keep me happy and just smiling, you know? I just go hang out and talk with them and they tell me all types of old stories, and sometimes I might even pull my horn out in the middle of the block, and they're playing on beer bottles and different things, and we just do a little second line type thing, just us, four or five people, who are just having fun. That makes me day to be able to do that and go hang out with the people in the (Treme) neighborhood, and to do some shows around town, you know?

What I like best in Baltimore is the people, the neighborhoods and what goes on in the neighborhoods. Each has its own stories, own diners and own quirks. It's about community. I also like everything Old Bay.

If we don't rebuild that connection with people we will really find even bigger gaps, because our gap on inequality is not just economic.

I put so much pop culture in my movies because we speak about pop culture all the time. But, for some reason, movies exist in a world where there's no pop culture.

I just haven't let myself get to a place where I've felt a part of any kind of a community, so I've always stayed outside of it.

We thought Donald Trump was leaving that world of entertainment and climbing over the wall into politics. In fact, what he did was he pulled the world of politics into the world of reality television.

I imagine a certain amount of consumer impulse will be replaced by community connection. You can already see it starting with things like the local food movement.

Urban people, of course, are terribly scared nowadays. They may yearn for society, but it is risky to go around talking to strangers, for a lot of reasons, one being that people are so accustomed not to have many human contacts that they are afraid they may find out they really prefer life that way.

Where we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith; where we have no reasons, we have lost both our connection to the world and to one another.

George's voice became deeper. He repeated his words rhythmically as though he had said them many times before. 'Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don't belong no place. They come to a ranch an' work up a stake, and the first thing you know they're poundin' their tail on some other ranch. They ain't got nothing to look ahead to.

People don't talk to each other. You're alone with your television set or internet. But you can't have a functioning democracy without what sociologists call "secondary organizations," places where people can get together, plan, talk and develop ideas. You don't do it alone.

The circus comes as close to being the world in microcosm as anything I know; in a way, it puts all the rest of show business in the shade.