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JAY-Z quotes

English (31)

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“in business . . . you don't get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate.” JAY-Z, Decoded
“Identity isn’t a prison you can never escape, but the way to redeem your past is not to run from it, but to try to understand it, and use it as a foundation to grow.” JAY-Z, Decoded
“Well, we hustle out of a sense of hopelessness Sort of a desperation Through that desperation, we become addicted Sort of like the fiends we accustomed to servin' But we feel we have nothin' to lose So, we offer you, well, we offer our...” JAY-Z, Can I Live
“You can put a new shirt on your back, slide a fresh chain around your neck, and accumulate all the money and power in the world, but at the end of the day those are just layers. Money and power don’t change you, they just further expose your...” JAY-Z, Decoded
“Rap has been a path between cultures in the best tradition of popular music.” JAY-Z, Decoded
“The burden of poverty isn’t just that you don’t always have the things you need, it’s the feeling of being embarrassed every day of your life, and you’d do anything to lift that burden.” JAY-Z, Decoded
“One of the reasons inequality gets so deep in this country is that everyone wants to be rich. That’s the American ideal. Poor people don’t like talking about poverty because even though they might live in the projects surrounded by other poor...” JAY-Z, Decoded
“Having a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other is the most common thing in the world.” JAY-Z, Decoded
“Artists can have greater access to reality; they can see patterns and details and connections that other people, distracted by the blur of life, might miss. Just sharing that truth can be a very powerful thing.” JAY-Z, Decoded
“Hip-hop gave a generation a common ground that didn’t require either race to lose anything; everyone gained.” JAY-Z, Decoded
“the more society treats drug addiction as a crime, the more money drug dealers will make 'relieving' the suffering of the addicts.” JAY-Z, Decoded
“Drug addicts kill themselves trying to get that feeling they got from their first high, looking for an experience they’ll never get again.” JAY-Z, Decoded
“the truth is you don’t need some external demon to take control of you to turn you into a raging, money-obsessed sociopath, you only need to let loose the demons you already have inside of you.” JAY-Z, Decoded
“Which is the other reason hip-hop is controversial: People don’t bother trying to get it. The problem isn’t in the rap or the rapper or the culture. The problem is that so many people don’t even know how to listen to the music.” JAY-Z, Decoded
“We were kids without fathers, so we found our fathers on wax and on the streets and in history, and in a way, that was a gift: We got to pick and choose the ancestors who would inspire the world we were going to make for ourselves.” JAY-Z, Decoded
“A poet’s mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level.” JAY-Z, Decoded
“The art of rap is deceptive. It seems so straightforward and personal and real that people read it completely literally, as raw testimony or autobiography.” JAY-Z, Decoded
“Everyone needs a chance to evolve.” JAY-Z, Decoded
“I believe you can speak things into existence.” JAY-Z, Decoded
“People give words power, so banning a word is futile, really.” JAY-Z, Decoded
“In the end, you can’t censor the truth, especially when it comes packaged in hot music.” JAY-Z, Decoded
“And we change people through conversation, not through censorship.” JAY-Z, Decoded
“Boxing is a glorious sport to watch and boxers are incredible, heroic athletes, but it’s also, to be honest, a stupid game to play. Even the winners can end up with crippling brain damage. In a lot of ways, hustling is the same.” JAY-Z, Decoded
“The music is meant to be provocative — which doesn’t mean it’s necessarily obnoxious, but it is (mostly) confrontational, and more than that, it’s dense with multiple meanings.” JAY-Z, Decoded
“Technology is making it easier to connect to other people, but maybe harder to keep connected to yourself” JAY-Z, Decoded
“Hip-hop is a perfect mix between poetry and boxing.” JAY-Z, Decoded
“When you step outside of school and have to teach yourself about life, you develop a different relationship to information. I’ve never been a purely linear thinker.” JAY-Z, Decoded
“If the beat is time, flow is what we do with that time, how we live through it. The beat is everywhere, but every life has to find its own flow.” JAY-Z, Decoded
“You could name practically any problem in the hood and there’d be a rap song for you.” JAY-Z, Decoded
“Housing projects can seem like labyrinths to outsiders, as complicated and intimidating as a Moroccan bazaar. But we knew our way around.” JAY-Z, Decoded
“But I wrote because I couldn’t stop. It was a release, a mental exercise, a way of keeping sane.” JAY-Z, Decoded
“Everybody look at you strange, say you changed Like you work that hard to stay the same” JAY-Z, Most Kingz

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music stupidity rap money poverty words power self poetry censorship drugs addiction hip-hop boxing identity change business time reality truth

Related sources

Decoded (30)
Can I Live (1)
Most Kingz (1)