Urban Struggle Quotes

I'm a thug. And my thug comes from... my definition of thug comes from half of the street element. Straight street hustling.

What I'm trying to tell people is that police brutality in the 'hood is nothing new. And the thing is that whether this guy, the cop killer in my song, is real or not, believe it, there are people at that point.

I've been through all the bad parts of the streets.

I come from where Mike Tyson came from. I come from right across the street from Jay-Z. I didn't have a pond in my backyard. I saw violence.

I remember my own life as a small boy, son of Jewish immigrants, in a janitor's flat on Orchard and Stanton streets on the Lower East Side of New York City. My father made pants and doubled as janitor of a tenement - before he made janitoring at $30 a month, plus rooms, a career.

I feel like I'm married to what I do, to the streets. And I feel like when the streets are mad, it's serious.

I am from the ghetto.

Yeah, I was a brother on the streets of Compton doing a lot of things most people look down on but it did pay off. Then we started rapping about real stuff that shook up the LAPD and the FBI. But we got our message across big time, and everyone in America started paying attention to the boys in the hood.

Either you were a hoodlum, or you were a puddle on the sidewalk.

My image of what a city should be - the super-rich and all the poor and desperate and the people who have some kind of a desire. It's a surviving game, people trying to survive on many different levels.

A city is a crazy concrete jungle whose people at the end of each day somehow make a small step ahead against terrible odds.

Long live the rose that grew from the concrete when no one else ever cared!

When you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax.

I thought it would be a good idea to look at New York with this half-European, half-native eye and really do something to get back at this city that I thought really gave me a hard time when I grew up.

How does one endure in a place they shouldn't be condemned to live in? You could take that same question and apply it to any number of neighborhoods in any number of cities.

In the street, your mouth's a beak, big like a bird, and your future's bleak.

The energy that New York exudes is as much the light of extinguished souls as it is the spark of individual enterprise. And while the full meaning of the city may prove elusive, all New Yorkers are painfully aware that it remains an intractable mass of contradictions. It is not just the extremes of wealth and poverty living side by side.

Pittsburgh is a very hard city, especially if you're black.

Mike Tyson and I came up together in the streets, and being around people like him, I learned what goes on behind the scenes.

People's hustle in the Bronx is real.

The city has always been an embodiment of hope and a source of feeling guilt; a dream pursued, and found vain, wanting, and destructive.

My life growing up was a twisted Bronx version of 'The Color Purple.' It had a much different soundtrack and no trees, but that desperation was the same.

I realized eventually that when I ran out of places to stay and found myself on the D train and in Central Park, I was actually homeless.