Chuck D Quotes

Being positive is like going up a mountain. Being negative is like sliding down a hill. A lot of times, people want to take the easy way out, because it's basically what they've understood throughout their lives.

If I can't change the people around me, I change the people around me.

I came from a mother and father who always made me secure in my beliefs, and that's where the love came from.

Reflect each day on all you have to be grateful for and you will receive more to be grateful for.

Knowledge, wisdom, and understanding don't come out of the microwave. You got to keep moving forward because the evil doesn't sleep.

It's weak to speak and blame somebody else ...When you destroy yourself.

Culture is this thing that we can exchange among ourselves as human beings to knock aside our differences and build upon our similarities. Cultural exchange is the ultimate exchange.

I got a letter from the government the other day I opened and read it...it said they were suckers.

Our freedom of speech is freedom or death, We got to fight the powers that be!

Rap comes from the humble beginnings of rebelling against the status quo. Now, rappers have become the status quo themselves. You can't rebel against the Queen and then become the Queen yourself. I attribute much of the blame to testosterone-male dominance and patriarchy.

I spread the message of hope and of unity. That's what gets me up in the morning. I can tell you what is wrong, but I can't tell you how to fix it. I'm a raptivist, not a politician. I deal in hope.

When culture is created in boardrooms with a panel of six or seven strategists for the masses to follow, to me that is no different than an aristocracy. It's not created from the people in the middle of the streets, so to speak. It is created from a petri dish for the sake of making money, and it is undermining the longevity of the culture.

I totally hate when somebody takes a classic and desecrates it. I like Jimmy Page and P. Diddy, but what they did to 'Kashmir' was a debacle.

The best way to boycott is to build your own

I think right about now we have to beware of marketed Malcolms and Martins. Real people do real things.

Never have so many men treated women like our foes. They call 'em hoes, but they might as well call them foes, 'cause you are totally against the existence of somebody who should live their life as an equal human being. If not, any man knows, it's like we're not equal. You know, women are usually a little better than us.

The best American is one who considers themselves as a citizen of the world.

These days you can't see who's in cahoots, Cause now the KKK wears three-piece suits.

Music and art and culture is escapism, and escapism sometimes is healthy for people to get away from reality. The problem is when they stay there.

Minds are the real estate of the 21st century.

No matter what the name, we're all the same pieces in one big chess game.

I think a good thing that needs to change is that people should be at least fearless about expressin' themselves.

Today, a young person that doesn't know themselves will totally be sold some other situation. Let's do your avatar. You know? And young people are going out, spending what little they have to try to buy themselves when they don't have themselves, or they feel like they don't have themselves. To me, that's like a damn pimp tragedy.

Comin' from the school of hard knocks, Some perpetrate...they drink Clorox. Attack the black, cause I know they lack exact The cold facts, and still they try to Xerox.

The immediacy of the technology of the web allows us, as songwriters, to write something very sharp and quick. That has a lot to do with helping a songwriter be more reflective of reality, instead of being in an area where you have to process things. It's the difference between processing fish and catching it in a boat.

Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and when people start getting it confused, that means they need to sit down with some real people.

And when I say it, they get alarmed... 'Cause I'm louder than a bomb.

Americans are not sharp. You can be sharp in your own area, I guess, but in this world you gotta be conscious of everybody else in the world too. You just can't be drunken with constitution and hear, okay we're gonna do this and then you hear well, we're gonna go kill this guy 'cause he's a terrorist and you keep gettin' it.

To live a life you love, you must Love the life you live.

Music used to cause revolutions and I'm not seeing much revolution anymore.

One of the problems with hip hop is lack of infrastructure and not being able to control its own course. I don't like that hip hop is full of infantile 35-year-olds. Hip hop cannot afford to be lazy.

I think governments are the cancer of civilization.

You can't master time, but you have to work your hardest to manage it.

With black people, there are 50 Hitlers over the course of history.

Many have forgotten what we came here for, Never knew or had a clue, so you're on the floor. Just growin' not known' about your past... Now you're lookin' pretty stupid while you're shakin' your ass.

The minute I get swelled up about something, something has always brought me back down to earth.

You should be a person inside the world with knowledge of your terrain. And if you lock yourself into the 2,000-by-3,000-square-mile, lower-48 box of the United States, you're going to be frustrated by its limitations. You gotta think outside the box.

All I want is peace and love on this planet. Ain't that how God planned it?

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.

Public Enemy is the security of the hip-hop party.

Let the voice be the voice of the voiceless and let it come from the world of rap music to keep the stereotype and the peace at the same time.

My thing is, the older you get you gotta stand up for what you believe in, and keep bashin' away.

I'm not a U.S. citizen. I mean, I'm an earth-izen. Borderline policies are crap to me.

If you want to speak about different ethnicities and diversity, rap and hip-hop are all over the planet. Every country, from Turkey to Australia, now has tons of hip-hop artists. The music and artistry have moved way faster than the corporatization of the music. You do need organization and opportunity for these artists to express themselves, and I don't think it has to come from a corporate co-signing.

I encourage more blacks and people of color to get a passport. That's one way to help put people on an equal platform.

Try to do your best to look people in the eye and talk to them without a gadget being in between you all the time.

Someone like Jay-Z does have a timeless quality, but it's much different than ours. You can look back at something like "At the Hop" by Danny and the Juniors or the music that was on American Bandstand in the 1950s-'60s.

If you go get a passport, it might encourage you to at least consider the world around you.

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.

Of course voting is useful. But then again, I don’t put a big glow to it. Voting is about as essential as washing yourself. It’s something you’re supposed to do. Now, you can’t go around bragging, expecting to get props because you voted. That’s stupid.