Yasiin Bey (Mos Def) Quotes
It's difficult to really be an artist nowadays. People are just on another page. You have a society that needs you to say something, but they don't want to give you the environment to be able to be just a functioning, happy, normal person. It's like, the industry is at odds with you, the society is at odds with you. You start to live in this very confined box where it's like, It's "me" and "them."
Quotes to Explore
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I have no regrets. I wouldn't have lived my life the way I did if I was going to worry about what people were going to say.
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There's very few people - like Shakespeare - who, no matter what, were gonna do what they did. For the rest of us, there's a lot of events that have to happen in order for things to end up the way they are.
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I wouldn't recommend being a musician to anyone. It's not glamorous. It's a lot of being dirty, not eating, playing for five people and one of them is the bartender.
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I've led a charmed life. I've known people who have been depressed, and I've never had that.
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The atom bomb is a paper tiger which the United States reactionaries use to scare people. It looks terrible, but in fact it isn't.
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All my life, people have asked me what I was so mad about. 'Why you so mad?' And I was never mad. I'm not mad, I just look mad.
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Mike Judge is very specific about how people look in his projects, and I think it's because he's an animator.
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My life is better than a lot of people I know. I'm definitely happy about that.
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My fiancee's brother-in-law was recently paralysed in an accident and it really brought home the fact that thousands of young people live with spinal injuries. It's an issue I wish had more coverage.
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We shall never get people whose time is money to take much interest in atoms.
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I like how steady the work in television is. Films, they're hard to come by. They're elusive. I've done a couple, independently financed. You do them, and maybe a few people will see them.
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People make music to get a reaction. Music is communication.
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To be a truly conscientious artist, you have to look at what's not working and challenge it. You riff on things.
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Sometimes I Google myself just to see what people are saying. But we all do that. If someone tells you that they don't, then they are lying.
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Rich people march on Washington every day.
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As intense as our work is, I try my hardest to live my life so that people in my office feel they can work at 'Frontline' and be parents if they choose to. This goes for the men as well.
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If the only reason people are coming in and doing anything in your office is because you're giving them a paycheck, I'm not sure you have the most productive workplace there.
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I am working to make sure we don't only protect the environment, we also improve governance.
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When one is not understood one should as a rule lower one’s voice, because when one really speaks loudly enough and is not heard, it is because people do not want to hear. One had better begin to mutter to oneself, then they get curious.
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I don't really move onstage; all I do is just gradually hunch more and more and jut out at the people in the front row.
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The era of gentleman racing drivers is ended.
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At one time if you were a black writer you had to be one of the best writers in the world to be published. You had to be great. Now you can be good. Mediocre. And that's good.
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It's difficult to really be an artist nowadays. People are just on another page. You have a society that needs you to say something, but they don't want to give you the environment to be able to be just a functioning, happy, normal person. It's like, the industry is at odds with you, the society is at odds with you. You start to live in this very confined box where it's like, It's "me" and "them."
