Jay-Z Quotes
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Ex-D-boy, used to park my Beamer Now look at me, I can park in my own arena
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Racism is taught in the home. We agree on that? Well, it's very hard to teach racism to a teenager who's listening to rap music and who idolizes, say, Snoop Dogg. It's hard to say, 'That guy is less than you.' The kid is like, 'I like that guy, he's cool. How is he less than me?
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People really feel like music is free, but will pay $6 for water. You can drink water free out of the tap and it's good water. But they're okay paying for it. It's just the mindset right now.
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Electing a black man named Barack Obama President in the same country that elected George W. Bush - twice! - is as far-fetched as a hustler from Marcy performing at that President's inauguration. But it happened.
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A poet's mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level.
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What people do in their own homes is their business, and you can choose to love whoever you love. That's their business. It's no different than discriminating against blacks. It's discrimination, plain and simple.
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By the time I got to record my first album, I was 26, I didn't need pen or paper - my memory had been trained just to listen to a song, think of the words, and lay them to tape.
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Stop screamin', you know the demon said it's best to die, And even if Jehovah witness, bet he'll never testify, D'Evils.
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For me, being with Obama or having dinner with Bill Clinton... It's crazy. It's mind-blowing, because where I come from is just another world. We were just ignored by politicians, by America in general.
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My life after childhood has two main stories: the story of the hustler and the story of the rapper, and the two overlap as much as they diverge. I was on the streets for more than half of my life from the time I was thirteen years old. People sometimes say that now I'm so far away from that life - now that I've got businesses and Grammys and magazine covers - that I have no right to rap about it. But how distant is the story of your own life ever going to be? The feelings I had during that part of my life were burned into me like a brand. It was life during wartime.
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Screamin' 'Carpe Diem!' until I'm a Dead Poet.
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Little brothers ring fingers get cut up to show mothers they really got em.
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[T]he truth is that drug addicts have a disease. It only takes a short time in the streets to realize that out-of-control addiction is a medical problem, not a form of recreational or criminal behavior. And the more society treats drug addiction as a crime, the more money drug dealers will make "relieving" the suffering of the addicts.
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On the night he died - he was twenty-seven - Basquiat had been planning to see a Run-DMC show. When people asked him what his art was about, he'd hit them with the same three words: "Royalty, heroism, and the streets.
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As kids we didn't complain about being poor; we talked about how rich we were going to be and made moves to get the lifestyle we aspired to by any means we could. And as soon as we had a little money, we were eager to show it.
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My tears is tatted, my rag in my pocket / Im just looking for love, I know somebody got it
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Successful people have a bigger fear of failure than people who've never done anything because if you haven't been successful, then you don't know how it feels to lose it all.
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When I come back like Jordan, wearing the 4-5. It ain't to play games with you, it's to aim at you, probably maim you. If I owe you I'm blowin' you to smithereens.
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When you step outside of school and have to teach yourself about life, you develop a different relationship to information. I've never been a purely linear thinker. You can see it in my rhymes. My mind is always jumping around, restless, making connections, mixing and matching ideas, rather than marching in a straight line. That's why I'm always stressing focus. My thoughts chase each other from room to room in my head if I let them, so sometimes I have to slow myself down.
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Now success was like lust, she's good to the touch, She's good for the moment, but she's never enough
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You could name practically any problem in the hood and there'd be a rap song for you.
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Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk. Martin Luther King walked so Obama could run. Obama's running so we all can fly.
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No matter where you go, you are what you are playa.
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Rap has been a path between cultures in the best tradition of popular music.