If they can send you to war at 18, maybe it's beneficial for some people to think that most of us gotta go to war for our own existence.

Public Enemy started out as a benchmark in rap music in the mid-1980s. We felt there was a need to actually progress the music and say something because we were slightly older than the demographic of rap artists at the time. It was a time of heightened rightwing politics, so the climate dictated the direction of the group.

If you want to be an artist, truly try to write what you believe, and if you write when you don't believe then you should try to become an actor.

The best medicine for pain sometimes is some kind of logic and common sense from older folks. They tell you, "Okay, you're not the only one who actually went through this."

You're always going to sound like yourself, but you can make really strong attempts to keep some similarities, but move away from what you did before for popularity's sake.

McDonald's offers a king's ransom to any hip-hop artist who is able to put Big Mac into a song. MTV - and more to the point, Viacom - is succeeding in extending a teenage life to twenty-nine or even thirty-one years old. It is about extending this market and removing any intelligent substance in the music.

I like Rick Ross as a person. I like Jay-Z and Kanye West as people. But I hate the companies that they record for.