The way music reflects real life, the way that painstakingly, over the years, what I have said is really a metaphor for what's happening to America. It used to be about, or tried to be at the very beginning, about what was right. It has stopped being what was right for America; it started being about what was right for companies that are in control.

This is the ultimate war of ideas. You're trying to get somebody to change their mind about conservatism, because that's exactly what we're fighting out there. We're fighting an insanely fundamentalist mentality that relies on taking certain things absolutely literally, and they're people on both sides of the conflict doing that. Even now, some people still take the Bible literally, and those are the ones wanting to fight a war against Islam.

It isn't me making money as much as it is me spending my money in a way that I feel is effective. My methodology is to say I'm not just going to throw money at a problem but rather personally invest myself in it.

Universal truth is not measured in mass appeal.

I have a strong army I keep with me and we don't go out there looking for problems. A lot of people have this perception... but I don't have a superiority complex about me because I'm from New York or because I'm Peruvian/Black. I think some people get caught up in that stuff.

I think that learning to read between the lines of traditional media is one way to stay informed, and also realizing that eventually you're going to have to cross-reference all sorts of different information coming from different sources.

Pessimism is an emotion not a philosophy.