I'm blacked than midnight on Broadway and Myrtle

To me, the job of the artist is to provide a useful and intelligent vocabulary for the world to be able to articulate feelings they experience everyday, and otherwise wouldn't have the means to express in a meaningful and useful way.

If Islam's sole interest is the welfare of mankind, then Islam is the strongest advocate of human rights anywhere on Earth.

Mos Def is a name that I built and cultivated over the years, it's a name that the streets taught me, a figure of speech that was given to me by the culture and by my environment, and I feel I've done quite a bit with that name. [But] it's time to expand and move on.

I think hip-hop is actually one of the most challenging things that's happened in music in a long time. The people who are in charge of what people see or hear are afraid. What you hear on top 40 or what you see on BET or MTV is not a fair representation of what is really going on...

You've got to validate every day. There are those who just put a stamp on it and say, "This is gonna be a good day and I'm not gonna let anything else make it a bad day."

I'm growing as an individual, but your always growing. All of my albums are snapshots of where I am artistically.