Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.

I had to adjust to living in a Third World country, which means that things people in the U.S. take for granted-like hot running water whenever you turn on the tap-are not always available.

I believe in life. And I have seen the death parade

We need to be weapons of mass construction, weapons of mass love. It's not enough just to change the system. We need to change ourselves.

The attitudes of many police organizations were extremely negative to the prospect of Rap, and many officials weren't afraid to say that they were against it. To them, Rappers were just criminals waiting to get caught.

We had to learn that we're beautiful. We had to relearn something forcefully taken from us. We had to learn about Black power. People have power if we unite. We learned the importance of coming together and being active

I had grown up at a time when people were being lynched, being attacked with water hoses. Becoming active and learning a different way of viewing my life was a healthy reaction to what I was seeing every day.