The 'king of hip hop' is always the poster child for capitalism, no matter who it is.

It doesn't matter what race you are. It doesn't matter what religion you are. I always tell people: If you want to be a part of hip-hop, you just need to have a heart. You need to have the courage to tell the truth.

If you don't have self-respect, if you don't have dignity, if you don't have some true knowledge of self and who you are, and where you're coming from, then you're absolutely lost.

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.

I wasn't always a revolutionary, I used to live life like a criminal even though I was going through high school or college, or the fact that I was smart, had no bearing on that. People can have intelligence all the way but have no direction. Not all criminals are idiots.

Those people who kill women, children, and defenseless civilians are about as Muslim as mass murderer Christopher Columbus was a Christian.

I don't think the war is going to end, but the war is just going to change. So we talk about change all the time, well that's what's going to change. You know, we tried having an idiot try and justify the war and give us these rationales and now we're going to have a very articulate and capable black man say it.