Jacob Lawrence
Artist
"This is my genre...the happiness, tragedies, and the sorrows of mankind as realized in the teeming black ghetto."
Ghetto quotes
Ghetto
244 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Richard Pryor
Comedian, Actor
"Booty is just a ghetto expression, and I'm just a booty star."
Snoop Dogg
Rapper, Actor
"There's no such thing as losing touch. You can take me out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of me."
Malcolm X
Civil Rights Activist, Minister
"One thing that the white man can never give the black man is self respect. The black man in the ghettos, have to start self correcting his own material moral, and spiritual defects, and evil. The black man need to start his own program to get rid of drunkenness, drug addiction and prostitution. The black man in America has to lift up his own sense of values."
Snoop Dogg
Rapper, Actor
"Drugs are so easy to get in the ghetto. They might not be easy to get in nice areas like Beverly Hills, but in Long Beach and Compton and South Central they're easy to get. They don't drop those drugs off in Beverly Hills. They drop them off in the ghetto. Then they tell us it's wrong to sell them. Well, we didn't bring them here. We just sell them. I was selling, like I sold newspapers."
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Ghetto quotes (page 1 of 13)
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"I wonder if heaven got a ghetto?"
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"I've told the kids in the ghettos that violence won't solve their problems, but then they ask me, and rightly so; "Why does the government use massive doses of violence to bring about the change it wants in the world?" After this I knew that I could no longer speak against the violence in the ghettos without also speaking against the violence of my government."
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"I'm responsible for what i did. I'm not responible for what every black male did. Yes! I call myself a THUG, because i grew up in the ghetto. And im still standing."
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"I was brought up in this part of Detroit that they used to call the ghetto."
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"If you walked by a street and you was walking a concrete and you saw a rose growing from concrete, even if it had messed up petals and it was a little to the side you would marvel at just seeing a rose grow through concrete. So way is it that when you see some ghetto kid grow out of the dirtiest circumstance and he can talk and he can sit across the room and make you cry, make you laugh, all you can talk about is my dirty rose, my dirty stems and how am leaning crooked to the side, u can't even see that I've come up from out of that."
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"I remember crying all the time. My major thing growing up was I couldn't fit in. Because I was from everywhere, I didn't have no buddies that I grew up with...Every time I had to go to a new apartment, I had to reinvent myself, myself. People think just because you born in the ghetto you gonna fit in. A little twist in your life and you don't fit in no matter what. If they push you out of the hood and the White people's world, that's criminal...Hell, I felt like my could be destroyed at any moment."
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"You've got to remember that west of Winnipeg the ridings the Liberals hold are dominated by people who are either recent Asian immigrants or recent migrants from eastern Canada: people who live in ghettoes and who are not integrated into western Canadian society."
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"I was born and raised in the ghetto, on welfare, two minutes from homeless."
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"If I didn't mould my reality then I'd still be in the ghetto where people like me are supposed to stay. You have to dream your way out of the nightmare."
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"Total ghettoization, because they were in charge of public housing, the local council, and they deliberately located people in a ghetto situation in order to ensure that they maintained control."
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"A lot of people have a misconception of what the ghetto is all about. You know, it's only a small percentage of the people that are bad. Everybody else is good."
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"When we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also declare that the white man does not abide by law in the ghettos. Day in and day out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provisions of civil services. The slums are the handiwork of a vicious system of the white society; Negroes live in them, but they do not make them, any more than a prisoner makes a prison."
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"Why is it so hard for people to believe that white people are poor?! I wouldn't say I lived in a ghetto, I'd say I lived in the 'hood. The same friends I had back then are the same people on tour with me now."
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"I'm a ghetto man who made good. I never forgot where I came from and who put me on top - God and Jack The Rapper."
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"The great moments of rock 'n' roll were never off in some corner of the music world, in a self-constructed ghetto."
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"I think we start suffering as soon as we come out of the womb. I think that people tend to stereotype. When they think of suffering, they think of abuse - physical abuse, emotional abuse, poverty, that kind of thing. There's different levels of suffering. I don't think that it has to do with how much money you have - if you were raised in the ghetto or the Hamptons. For me it's more about perception: self-perception and how you perceive the world."
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"In the Ghetto, I'd been trying to write for years."
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"I don't get nothing but love. In every ghetto all over the world. Nothing but love. They respect that I came outta there and I'm doing it the right way. You can't do nothing but respect that."
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"Sarah Palin and her virtual burqa have me and my friends retching into our handbags. She's such a power-mad, backwater beauty-pageant casualty, it's easy to write her off and make fun of her. But in reality I feel as horrified as a ghetto Jew watching the rise of National Socialism."
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"A great wind swept over the ghetto, carrying away shame, invisibility and four centuries of humiliation. But when the wind dropped people saw it had been only a little breeze, friendly, almost gentle."
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