Talib Kweli Quotes
- All Quotes
-
A true artist does not depend on radio for success. A true fan does not let radio determine what they support
-
No one likes to be treated like people in minority communities. What it's saying is that because you're poor, because you live in a neighborhood that deals with oppressed conditions, you deserve to be treated like a criminal. In our Constitution it says you have the right to live without illegal search and seizure.
-
I feel like people mislead themselves when they tell themselves they're into me because of the lyrics. From my vantage point, people aren't into me because of the content, because of the lyrics. Because there's a million of rappers who have great content.
-
You can have your own opinion, but not your own facts.
-
But there's so many things in life like women, like children, like God and family that transcends the world of hip-hop.
-
When I met you it was magic... We polar opposites, but attracted like we was magnets.
-
Why give you the cure when the disease makes money?
-
"Art Imitates life," of course, is that phrase by Oscar Wilde. I called that song "Art Imitates Life" because Oh No was in the studio and he actually came up with that hook. When I was trying to figure out a name for the record, it just kind of made sense.
-
You see somebody rapping and you're like, "Nah, my cousin can do that." You're spoiled by the experience. Overseas, it's still something that people can appreciate.
-
It’s very seductive to focus on what you don’t like as opposed to celebrating all that it is that you do.
-
Truthfully I wanna rhyme like common senseNext best thing I do a record with common sense
-
I think the biggest problem in our country is mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex. From the Rockefeller drug laws to stand your ground to stop and frisk, all these are pointing people, especially and disproportionately black and brown people, towards the criminal-justice system. It's depleting whole generations of people.
-
Who you? Your name smaller than fine grains in couscous It's the highest calibre, your calibre is deuce deuce
-
My fans like to be romantic. I feel like I'm creating at least at the same level or even a higher level of creativity than I was at twenty-one. I've gotten better as an artist.
-
I gotta be dope first. I gotta be appealing to your senses, and to what you like first. Then the message happens. Then you relate to the message.
-
I have such respect for the art of deejaying. I hesitate to even call myself a deejay.
-
When I was a teenager, the way some of these kids out here be actively gay, it would have been ridiculed in the hood. And now the hood is a bit more accepting. Begrudgingly accepting, but definitely more accepting than 20 years ago when I was a little kid. That doesn't mean that anybody should stop fighting for equality just because people are begrudgingly a little more accepting.
-
With Prisoner of Conscience, the focus was - I've worked with Madlib, High Tech, Kanye West, J Dilla. I feel like I've worked with some of the greatest of all time. That's been overlooked. That's been overshadowed by the weight of the lyrics.
-
The founder of Crunk Feminists is a Christian. If you claim to be a Christian, but then you attack somebody for saying you should approach a problem with love, you're not being a true Christian.
-
Jazz is the greatest American art form and our greatest export. We don't pay attention to the youth of jazz, don't stoke the fires creatively for the youth coming up. I feel like jazz musicians became too much of purists - with Donald Byrd doing funk jazz in the '70s.
-
I'm not an artist that has a big, huge radio record that's going to be on BET. I'm not, at this point, gunning for like, "Oh, I'm gonna kill them in the first week." But as people slowly discover the album they realize it's better than a lot of what they've been listening to all year.
-
There just needs to be a gay rapper who's better than everybody. That's when that question will no longer be able to be asked.
-
Hopefully, we learn to appreciate hip-hop here so that it doesn't go the way of jazz.
-
Or is it the mind state that's ill, creating crime rates to fill the new prisons the build