Really Ghetto Quotes & Sayings

'Be faithful to your roots' is the liberal version of 'Stay in your ghetto.' — Mason Cooley

There is one other wall, of course. One we never speak of. One we never see, One which separates memory from madness. In a place no one offers flowers. THE WALL WITHIN. We permit no visitors. Mine looks like any of a million nameless, brick walls - it stands in the tear-down ghetto of my soul; that part of me which reason avoids for fear of dirtying its clothes and from atop which my sorrow and my rage hurl bottles and invectives at the rolled-up windows of my passing youth. Do you know the wall I mean? - Steve Mason, U.S. Army captain (Vietnam), poet Excerpted from the poem "The Wall Within" by Steve Mason, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran considered the unofficial poet laureate of the Vietnam War. "The Wall Within" was read at the 1984 dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, and was entered in its entirety into the Congressional Record. — Kevin Sites

The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn't need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder-in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever. — Maya Angelou

When hip-hop was born she had no commercial home, and was an invention of beautiful creativity. Born from a beautiful struggle, today she is mostly a 'ratchet' bitch spitting nonsense from her pimp's mansion. — T.F. Hodge

You're either ghetto or you're not. — Vince Staples

Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink. They create distances for all and shrink them for only a few. A new dirt road through the wilderness brings the city within view, but not within reach, of most Brazilian subsistence farmers. The new expressway expands Chicago, but it sucks those who are well-wheeled away from a downtown that decays into a ghetto. — Ivan Illich

As a people, our monuments never commemorate victories. They commemorate the names of the fallen. We don't need the Arc de Triomphe; we have Masada, Tel-Hai, and the Warsaw Ghetto - where the battle was lost, but the war of Jewish existence was won. — David Elazar

Today, a similar debate rages in black communities about the underlying causes of mass incarceration. While some argue that it is attributable primarily to racial bias and discrimination, others maintain that it is due to poor education, unraveling morals, and a lack of thrift and perseverance among the urban poor. Just as former slaves were viewed (even among some African Americans) as unworthy of full citizenship due to their lack of education and good morals, today similar arguments can be heard from black people across the political spectrum who believe that reform efforts should be focused on moral uplift and education for ghetto dwellers, rather than challenging the system of mass incarceration itself. — Michelle Alexander

Reaching out to any fellow ghetto kids is an act he puts in the same category as doing drugs: the initial rush of warmth and euphoria puts you on a path to ruin. — Ron Suskind

The problem with you middle-class gay guys is, you pass for white. You move to the metropolitan gay centres, and you're more or less closeted--"private", you'd call it--when you step outside the ghetto. You assimilate yourselves, and suddenly you've got property to protect and money invested. I ask you, what impelled the militants of the civil rights movement of the sixties? You know what impelled them? They had nothing to lose. That's how they could brave the police dogs and the fire hoses. Even torture and death. Could you have done that? — Ethan Mordden

I am a product of a rat and roach infested black ghetto. It is easy for me to rationalize my dealings as a numbers man. I'll defend men today who are involved in it. — Don King

I don't hide anything about my life, I talk about everything. I talk about it - all kinds of things. I've done songs about bad experiences, a couple about growing up in the ghetto and being abused, sexually. Being raped. And I talk about it. — Lady Saw

I have always disliked the idea of an arts ghetto in which poetry is kept on a life-support system. — Tony Harrison

There'd never been a clothing line made by a young woman like me: a multiethnic woman who has one foot in Gucci and one foot in the ghetto. — Kimora Lee Simmons

We become like dead branches and last year's leaves and what the hell good are we for ourselves and the world in a mental ghetto. — Chaim Potok

At Murry Bergtraum [High School] if you were really funny you sat at this table at with all of the funniest dudes, the toughest, the coolest - everybody sat at that table. It was like the ghetto Algonquin Round Table. [Comedy] was my entry, my membership card. — John Leguizamo

In my experience I haven't met too many uptight black people. I'm sure they're out there. Like I'm some big authority and I've lived in the inner city and ghetto. — Paul Reubens

him swinging the baton and knocking out my side teeth and cracking my temple so that I can never hear good out of that ear again and saying let that be a lesson to never take you dutty, stinking, ghetto self uptown again. And I see them and I wait. But — Marlon James

Punk can be a mental ghetto. People get into it and make all these rules and pretty soon they're worse than born again Christians and have stupid three hour conversation about things like, which band is a sellout and is straight edge cool or un-cool and it's just completely idiotic. So punk has taught me the aesthetic of the outsider, which is great, but it's also taught me not to get involved in petty little cults. — Jesse Michaels

The sea of excited people, the flood of colored lights, and the unending stream of cars were proof that the days of the Holocaust were now part of the history books. I awakened from my horrible memories and almost agreed with the opinion voiced by many that the ghetto was a dead issue and the whole period surrounding it too far-fetched, too cruelly-sadistic, to be believable today, assuming it really existed.... The reign of man-eating furnaces is hard for a reasonable mind to grasp, even that of someone who was a victim himself. — Joseph Bau

I'm not really sure what I'd like to see people doing more of online, but what I'd like to see less of is the warning signs that not ratifying net neutrality is gonna cause two separate nets: one that the big dogs can afford to be on and the other a ghetto internet that no one goes on. Think FM vs AM radio, or cable vs broadcast TV. — Drew Curtis

You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest. — Junot Diaz

Are you kidding me?' Shan asked, slightly drunk, slightly dramatic, and now sitting yoga style on the floor. 'You can't write an honest novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it'll be too obvious. Black writers who do literary fiction in this country, all three of them, not the ten thousand who write those bullshit ghetto books with the bright covers, have two choices: they can do precious or they can do pretentious. When you do neither, nobody knows what to do with you. So if you're going to write about race, you have to make sure it's so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn't read between the lines won't even know it's about race ... ' p.335 — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

There's a reason why the story of the ghetto should never come with a photo. The Third World slum is a nightmare that defies beliefs or facts, even the ones staring right at you. A vision of hell that twists and turns on itself and grooves to its own soundtrack. Normal rules do not apply here. Imagination then, dream, fantasy. You visit a ghetto, particularly a ghetto in West Kingston, and it immediately leaves the real to become this sort of grotesque, something out of Dante or the infernal painting of Hieronymus Bosch. It's a rusty red chamber of hell that cannot be described so I will not try to describe it. It cannot be photographed because some parts of West Kingston, such as Rema, are in the grip of such bleak and unremitting repulsiveness that the inherent beauty of the photographic process will lie to you about just how ugly it really is. — Marlon James

If you live in a ghetto and really want not to just change your life and your family's life but change your ghetto's life, make your ghetto a good neighbourhood, learn science; try to be like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. — Will.i.am

It's not that I prefer black girls, but that's who I find myself relating to as a human being. I am also attracted to really ghetto girls, straight out the hood ... a thickey, a real 'pass the hot sauce' type girl. — Jon B.

Because I'm a young black man driving a really nice, expensive car, I sometimes get harassed when I'm rolling through a ghetto neighbourhood. — Coolio

I had not yet been to Gettysburg. I had not read Thavolia Glymph. All I had was the feeling, the weight. I did not yet know, and I do not fully know now. But part of what I know ist hat there is the burden of living among Dreamers, and there is the extra burden of your country telling you the Dream is just, noble, and real, and you are crazy for seeing the corruption and smelling the sulfur. For their innocence, they nullify your anger, your fear, until you are coming and going, and you find yourself inveighing against yourself - "black people are the only people who..." - really inveighing against your own humanity and raging against the crime in your ghetto, because you are powerless before the great crime of history that brought the ghettos to be. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I don't like the way people cherish the ghetto, as if it's some royal palace, or kingdom. I also don't like the way people treat each other in the ghetto. It is really hard to find love, trust, and respect. You don't find too many people that want to do better for themselves in the ghetto because so many people seem to be satisfied with where they're at. — Delano Johnson

I am frequently asked if I have visited Israel, whereas yet, it is simply assumed that I have. Well, I don't travel. I really don't, and if I did, I probably wouldn't visit Israel. I remember how it was in 1948 when Israel was being established and all my Jewish friends were ecstatic, I was not. I said: what are we doing? We are establishing ourselves in a ghetto, in a small corner of a vast Muslim sea. The Muslims will never forget nor forgive, and Israel, as long as it exists, will be embattled. I was laughed at, but I was right. I can't help but feel that the Jews didn't really have the right to appropriate a territory only because 2000 years ago, people they consider their ancestors, were living there. History moves on and you can't really turn it back. (#92 ff.) — Isaac Asimov

The Zionist movement did not send any assistance, financial or otherwise, for the victims of Nazism and it did not allow any other side to provide any kind of aid. The Zionist movement concealed the information that came from within the ghetto walls and concentration camps, news that shed light on what was really happening. If it had to publish anything, it did so by questioning that information and diminishing its importance. — Mahmoud Abbas

There's the animation ghetto of feature films in this country. There's this flavor at DreamWorks, and Pixar does their own thing, and generally they're safe. But if you look at Walt Disney's original films, at the time and in the context, they weren't safe. They were really dark and troubling. — Henry Selick

It is my belief that exciting things happen when a variety of overlapping activities designed for all people-the old and the young, the blue and white collar, the local inhabitant and the visitor, different activities for different occasions-meet in a flexible environment, opening up the possibility of interaction outside the confines of institutional limits. When this takes place, deprived areas welcome dynamic places for those who live, work and visit; places where all can participate, rather than less or more beautiful ghettos. — Richard Rogers

Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto. — Ursula K. Le Guin

There was no person, whether they thought I was too fat, too black, too country, too ghetto, too New York, too thug or too whatever! Nobody ultimately had the say over whether or not I was going to make it. — Kelly Price

I raise my stein to the builder who can remove ghettos without removing people as I hail the chef who can make omelets without breaking eggs. — Robert Moses

Why shouldn't rap be esoteric, able to take in current events, history and criticism? I guess it's this old idea of containment - that rappers, because they're black, can't and shouldn't aspire to look outside the ghetto for influence. — Saul Williams

This, then, is the global significance of Chungking Mansions. It is a building of the periphery within a city of the core, a city located between the developing world's manufacturing hub and its poorest nether regions. It is a ghetto of middle-class striving within a city of wealthier middle-class striving, viewing its denizens with fear and scorn yet letting business as usual be the law of the day. Chungking — Gordon Mathews

Statistically speaking, tracking tended to diminish learning and boost inequality wherever it was tried. In general, the younger tracking happened, the worse the entire country did on PISA. There seemed to be some kind of ghetto effect: once kids were labeled and segregated into the lower track, their learning slowed down. — Amanda Ripley

For most Black people there is still poverty and desperation. The Ghettos still exist, and the proportion of Blacks in prison is still much greater than Whites. Today, there is less overt racism, but the economic injustices create an "institutional racism" which exists even while more Blacks are in high places, such as Condoleeza Rice in Bush's Administration and Obama running for President. — Howard Zinn

It's dangerous to be a child star, but it's dangerous to be a child in the ghetto, or to be a child at school being bullied. — Will.i.am

We insist that this stuff we call science fiction is not SCI-FI. For some in the ghetto of Genre this is axiomatic, a secret truth known only to the genre kids, that there is proper science fiction and then there's that SCI-FI shit. — Hal Duncan

He looks at me and then, reverting to the voice he'd used with Kendra, says, 'If homegirls wanna see me as ghetto trash'
he stops and switches to his lispy, sassy voice
'or big-ass queer'
now he switches to his deepest Shakespeare voice
'I shall not take it upon myself to disabuse them. — Gayle Forman

There would be no Rock and Roll without Ike Turner, James Brown, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint, etc. Fake ghetto books and fake ghetto music. Elvis Presley, whom they idol, is merely a karaoke makeover of James Brown and Chuck Berry. — Ishmael Reed

I believe in heaven more than hell, lessons more than jail.
In the ghetto, let love prevail with a story to tell.
My eyes see the glory, and well,
The world waiting for me to yell, "I Have A Dream!" — Common

My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of 'Gone With the Wind', and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It's actually one of the things that you live and die for. — Neil Gaiman

We too are so dazzled by power and money as to forget our essential fragility, forget that all of us our in the ghetto, that the ghetto is fenced in, that beyond the fence stands the lords of death, and not far away the train is waiting. — Primo Levi

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. — Will.i.am

For years I've been interested in a fundamental question concerning what I call the psychology of evil: Why is it that good people do evil deeds? I've been interested in that question since I was a little kid. Growing up in the ghetto in the South Bronx, I had lots of friends who I thought were good kids, but for one reason or another they ended up in serious trouble. They went to jail, they took drugs, or they did terrible things to other people. My whole upbringing was focused on trying to understand what could have made them go wrong. — Philip Zimbardo

The Israeli mentality was totally different to mine. They just didn't understand people like me. They couldn't understand why I had been in a ghetto. We were totally different. — Edgar Hilsenrath

'm constantly depressed by the Mexican gang members I meet in East L.A. who essentially live their lives inside five or six blocks. They are caught in some tiny ghetto of the mind that limits them to these five blocks because, they say, "I'm Mexican. I live here." And I say, "What do you mean you live here - five blocks? Your granny, your abualita, walked two thousand miles to get here. She violated borders, moved from one language to another, moved from a sixteenth-century village to a twenty-first-century city, and you live within five blocks?" — Richard Rodriguez

Ghetto is not the People but their state of mind. — Joan Ambu

In the new American ghetto, the nightmare engine is bubble economics, a kind of high-tech casino scam that kills neighborhoods just like dope does, only the product is credit, not crack or heroin. It concentrates the money of the population in just a few hands with brutal efficiency, just like narco-business, and just as in narco-business the product itself, debt, steadily demoralizes the customer to the point where he's unable to prevent himself from being continually dominated. — Matt Taibbi

He refuses to sell his paintings and writes "NOT FOR SALE" on some of them. He is furious because people are writing about his ghetto childhood and call him a "graffiti artist" and "primitive." "They don't invent a childhood for white artists," he says. — Jennifer Clement

Part of the French political class is realising that there is are large number of Muslim people coming from the ghettos who want to make themselves heard, politically, especially about foreign policy issues. Its electoral weight can bring back to the forefront the Palestinian issue. — Tariq Ramadan

When you've been on a ghetto diet your entire life, you're just happy to get a large soda instead of a medium. — Chris Rock

Nobody ever got their ass out of the ghetto by letting someone else step ahead of them in line. And no-one ever got rich and famous by laying back and hoping someone would notice who they are and what they do. — Snoop Dogg

Mr. Beaconsfield is the Year Eleven drama teacher. He's one of those teachers who likes being "down with the kids" - all gelled hair and "call me Jeff."He's also the reason our version of Romeo and Juliet is set in a Brooklyn ghetto and Juliet is leaning out of a trailer rather than a balcony. — Zoe Sugg

A democracy survives when its citizens have access to trustworthy and impartial sources of information, when it can discern lies from truth. Take this away and a democracy dies. The fusion of news and entertainment, the rise of a class of celebrity journalists on television who define reporting by their access to the famous and the powerful, the retreat by many readers into the ideological ghettos of the Internet and the ruthless drive by corporations to destroy the traditional news business are leaving us deaf, dumb and blind. — Chris Hedges

Richard Price, who has made a fortune writing fake ghetto books, says he takes a cab into the ghetto, transcribes Black speech for a brief time and returns home. His fake ghetto books have bought him a townhouse in Gramercy Park and home on Staten Island. — Ishmael Reed