Lupe Fiasco Quotes

When I started making my own music, I was more about recreating what I was hearing. I noticed that I had some control over what I was saying, and the effects that it's going to have on people. I wanted to focus more on the positive side of things, which are more in tune with my morals and ethics.

The biggest budget is the military budget. For what? We're fighting two wars in very small countries that have no nuclear weapons, that have no capabilities to destroy anything. They probably couldn't even get to America.

With 'Hip-Hop Saved My Life,' I attempted to make 'Kick, Push,' but for rappers. To give a real basic play-by-play of the life of a rapper before he makes it - if he ever makes it, because you can get stuck in that and be trying to make it for the rest of your life.

Faced with the way the system does you in the 'hood sometimes, if you don't literally get out, your chances are slim. You'll definitely die mentally. You'll pretty much die physically.

My problem is I’m peaceful, and I believe in the people.

In Chicago, you have an absence of strong family units, and that absence gets filled by gangs. You have a failure in the school system, after-school programs and other social programs to help keep kids off the streets. Amnesty International speaks to that in some way, by keeping these issues in the forefront.

It's a massive undertaking putting an album together... It's not light weight at all.

For me, I walk a line of fame and infamy. I walk the line of celebrity and non-celebrity.

I grew up in the 'hood around prostitutes, drug dealers, killers, and gangbangers, but I also grew up juxtaposed: On the doorknob outside of our apartment, there was blood from some guy who got shot; but inside, there was National Geographic magazines and encyclopedias and a little library bookshelf situation.

I'm not in competition with nobody. I want to make good music for my fans who want it, who enjoy it, who learn something from it. And that's what it is.

How can land be owned by another man. Warns one can not steal what was given as a gift. Is the sky owned by birds and the rivers owned by fish.

This nation was founded by rebels and revolutionaries, and its flags were carried across the battlefields by people who were very, very against the status quo and who questioned and criticized.

I can strip down basic principles of certain things and apply it to everything else. And that keeps you interested, changing the art form, making it more avant-garde. Because I can't play any instruments.

Sometimes I wish I never found the Internet. Sometimes I regret getting a laptop and Wi-Fi for logging into the Internet because it is such a distraction. If you have any addictive personality, the Internet will magnify it.

If you're informed, you make an informed choice. You understand the quality of certain things and you understand the history of certain things.

What starts in clouded minds finishes in the rain

Fear is such a weak emotion that’s why I despise it

The stuff that I make and the things that I talk about, you have to listen, so if the beat is doing too much, it's going to take you away. If the hook is too distracting, it's going to take you away. The hook just needs to be enough to get you from one verse to the next.

It definitely wasn't like, 'Hey, I'm going to steal that, and nobody's going to know.' The original 'T.R.O.Y.' came out in 1992, and it was like a 20th anniversary kind of thing. All of those intentions were there for it to be resurrecting a classic for a new generation. I tried to honor it.

Most things that are politically right are morally wrong

I want to make music as good as Radiohead, as good as Coldplay. I can make hip-hop as good as anybody.

If you're going to fight terrorism, to me, you fight the root causes of terrorism.

You always wrestle with depression, you always wrestle with those things, because the events and the experiences are still there, and the things that take place are still happening.

Success is a very dangerous thing and I think we have to be very careful about when we dictate what success is for somebody else. Because you don't know what it's like.

The rewards we get by being those weird guys going against the grain to me are way more massive than selling a million billion records. I like climbing mountains or going on undersea dives for whales and stuff like that.

People don't understand that where I come from, everyone is either a convict, been in jail, been in a gang, is a hooligan of some sorts, but those are my brothers, my family and the people that I travel with. Those are the people that I roll with.

The only person who really impressed me with making new music is Cudi. Everyone else seems to be jumping on the same music, the producer-made stuff, but the one person that's made new music to me is Cudi.

I hope that God forgive us, all of us sinners turn us back into beginners, put us up where the winners go, Holy apartments in the gardens in which the rivers flow, thank you for all your blessings and all of your miracles.

You know, my goal, once I leave the music business, is like, 'Man, Lupe didn't lead us astray.' It comes directly from Islam: leading people astray is the worst thing you could do. Especially in perpetuity; like, your music continues to go on and live without you. That risk is too great for me; I'm gonna keep it positive.

I think that all the silence is worse than all the violence, Fear is such a weak emotion that's why I despise it, We scared of almost everything, afraid to even tell the truth, So scared of what you think of me, I'm scared of even telling you...

We have to make the physical music a little more valuable instead of just having a download link and a bunch of songs you downloaded from some torrent site. People try to make the music value-less, and I don't think we're going to stop that train, but the one thing that they can't devalue are things that are in the outside world.

I always say that you define what success is to yourself.

People have their morals, but morals aren't concrete. People think because I'm a Muslim that I pray five times a day, but you're never going to see that on a day-to-day basis. People fluctuate. To me, that was the most specific way to put it, the best way to be like, "I listen to this music, but it's the most violent music on the planet." But I like it, and to make up for it, I don't say the cuss words. That's how I get away with it.

I'm a big fan of science fiction, animation, and things of that nature. Other worlds and that type of stuff.

The world brought me to my knees, what have you brung you?

The truth is limitless in its range, if you drop the T and look at it in reverse it could hurt.

I was literally told for 'The Show Goes On' that I shouldn't rap too deep. I shouldn't be too lyrical. It just needs to be something easy on the eyes. Like a record company telling Picasso that we don't need these abstract interpretations of life, where people have to sit down and look at it and break it down.

It's a funny line when you're walking - the creativity, the subjectivity versus the objectivity, creativity versus the business, and recognizing that you are in the music business, so there are certain things that you have to acquiesce to on the business side and certain creative decisions that you have to make for the purposes of serving the business side of it.

For me, I never wore my religion on my sleeve, you know what I'm saying? I never put myself out there as Lupe Fiasco, he's Muslim, he's from Chicago, he likes to ride a skateboard.

I think that American presidents, that position in itself, as well as American foreign policy, it has terrorism in it. CIA agents going to overthrow certain governments - they're using terrorist tactics. They're not going in there like, 'Hey, you wanna have some cake?'

When you understand that your tax dollars pay for those tear gas canisters that were being fired into the crowd, and when you see that, and to know that a little bit of your fingerprint, your American DNA is a part of that, as well as those stealth bombers and that bomb that's lodged in the side of the school that has "Made in USA" on it in Gaza, and all of the unmanned drones that are blowing up weddings and things of that nature, to know that you pay for that, you really have - you don't have to do it now, but you need to think about that.

I trust people to be human. Sometimes you do things that make amazing amounts of sense; sometimes you do things that don't make any sense whatsoever.

When I retire, I want to step away on a positive note. What you put out into the world comes back to you. You actually change the world with what you do. I want to put some good in the world.

I can't play any instrument for the life of me, but I know what I want to hear.

Chief Keef scares me... not him specifically, but just the culture that he represents.

My father had been in the military and he was a weapons specialist, so he had an affinity for weapons but also for the discipline of it. He taught us how to shoot when we were young. He opened up karate schools in the worst parts of the city, on purpose, and then he would systematically clean out a three-block radius, all of the gang-bangers and drug dealers and everybody of nefarious character.

I find it somewhat liberating to jump, to dive into things that are the opposite of me.

My mother and my father taught me to look at the actual problem, not the face of it, not the veneer of it. So for me, I was never - I was impressed that it - racially, I was impressed, right, but now in America it's about economics, and it's been about economics, and honestly, everything's been about economics since I don't want to say the beginning of time, but it's been about economics for a long while.