N-Now th-that that dont kill me — Kanye West

"Well buy a lot of clothes, but we dont really need em Things we buy to cover up whats inside Cause they made us hate ourself and love their wealth."

"It seems, we living the American dream But people highest up got the lowest self esteem. The prettiest people do the ugliest things For the road to riches and diamond rings."

"I get down for my grandfather who took my mama Made her sit in that seat where white folks aint want us to eat At the tender age of six, she was arrested for the sit-ins And with that in my blood, I was born to be different Now niggas cant make it to ballots to choose leadership But we can make it to Jacobs or to the dealership Thats why I hear new music and I just dont be feeling it Racisms still alive, they just be concealin it."

"And I still wont grow up, Im a grown-ass kid Swear I should be locked up for stupid shit that I did But Im a champion, so I turned tragedy to triumph Make music thats fire, spit my soul through the wire."

"During Kanye West’s spectacular plummet last fall, my friends and I would often marvel at the latest outrageous thing he’d said. And we would send around clips of what were, in hindsight, terribly suspect comments he’d previously made. One such example was “I am not a fan of books,” which Ye told an interviewer upon the publication of his own book, Thank You and You’re Welcome. “I am a proud non-reader of books,” he continued. That statement strikes me as one of the more disturbing things he’s ever said. Ye’s patently reprehensible anti-Semitic tirades rightly drew the world’s scorn. But his anti-book stance is disturbing because it says something about not only Ye’s character but the smugly solipsistic tenor of this cultural moment. We have never before had access to so many perspectives, ideas, and information. Much of it is fleetingly interesting but ultimately inconsequential—not to be confused with expertise, let alone wisdom. This much is widely understood and discussed. The ease with which we can know things and communicate them to one another, as well as launder success in one realm into pseudo-authority in countless others, has combined with a traditional American tendency toward anti-intellectualism and celebrity worship. Toss in a decades-long decline in the humanities, and we get our superficial culture in which even the elite will openly disparage as pointless our main repositories for the very best that has been thought."

"My flow is in the pocket like Wallace, I got the bounce like hydraulics, I cant call it, I got the swerve like alcoholics. My freshman year, I was going through hella problems Til I built up the nerve to drop my ass up out of college."