The only trend I do not like in rap right now is the message rap. I co — Hip hop

"[T]he hip hop nation is wonderful. Surely there are those who would demonize this group of young people, but they are only doing what our ancestors have always done: used what they have to get where they need to go."

"I think it’s unconstitutional when art is used against an artist to implicate them in a crime. The First Amendment provides that people have free expression, and I think with Black men the lens — we’re evaluated almost exclusively through a criminal lens. And so what would be art in the eyes of, or at the creation of, one person becomes a crime when it’s created by a young Black man. Again, it’s good that the judges pushed back against those attacks on 2Pac’s artistry and his constitutional right, but we’ve seen that since that time, prosecutors have continued to use rap lyrics to try to chill free expression."

"Many black rappers--including Ice-T and Sister Souljah--contend that they are being unfairly singled out because their music reflects deep changes in society not being addressed anywhere else in the public forum. The white politicians, the artists complain, neither understand the music nor desire to hear whats going on in the devastated communities that gave birth to the art form."

"Young black kids didnt grow up wanting to be a pimp or a stripper like they do now. You might think Im making generalizations, but I dont think I am. Thats how serious this stuff is. When I was young, cats going to college got as much (love) as the ones who could rap or play ball."

"This is hip hop. Hands up, if youre forever a fan of hip hop. I wake up hip hop, go to sleep hip hop. Dream about hip hop, because I am hip hop."

"So if I act like a pimp aint nothin to it gangsta rap made me do it If I call you a nappy headed ho aint nothin to it gangsta rap made me do it If I shoot up your college aint nothin to it gangsta rap made me do it If I rob you of knowledge aint nothin to it gangsta rap made me do it"

"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."

"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."

"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"

"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"