Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk. Martin Luther King walked so Obama could run. Obama’s running so we all can fly.
JAY-ZIt was a very intense and stressful situation. There was playing in the Johnny-pump (an opened fire hydrant) and the ice-cream man coming around and all of these games that we’d play, and suddenly it would turn just violent and there would be shootings at 12 in the afternoon on any given day.
More Jay-Z Quotes
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The experiences that I’ve had growing up with music, you know, I couldn’t trade them for any money in the world. Dancing in the living room to enjoy myself. ‘Enjoy Yourself,’ Michael Jackson.
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That’s why this generation is the least racist generation ever. You see it all the time. Go to any club.
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Everyone’s supposed to stay in their lines and be neat. ‘You’re a rapper. You’re supposed to rap, carry a boom box, wear chains, and go to the club – that’s all you do. What are you doing collecting art?
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Nothing me and Kanye can do musically was gonna match the event of what we were trying to do. So we were trying to deliver an album and experience at one time; that was the idea for ‘Watch The Throne’.
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I’ve always believed in good music over bad music. I believe in two sorts of musics. And the lines that separate us, I don’t believe in that. That’s for people who need to easily define what they’re hearing. Me, I’m cool with everything and anything I’m hearing that’s music. It comes under one definition for me.
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I’m far from being god, but I work god damn hard.
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I’m hungry for knowledge. The whole thing is to learn every day, to get brighter and brighter. That’s what this world is about.
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I’ve never looked at myself and said that I need to be a certain way to be around a certain sort of people.
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My first album was mainly dealing with street issues, and it was ‘coded’: it was called ‘Reasonable Doubt.’ So the things I was talking about…
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I was forced to be an artist and a CEO from the beginning, so I was forced to be like a businessman because when I was trying to get a record deal, it was so hard to get a record deal on my own that it was either give up or create my own company.
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I don’t sit around with my friends and talk about money, ever. On a record, that’s different.
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When you have a reputation for making not only good songs but great albums, that in itself creates added artistic pressure. But, at the end of the day, I guess that pressure is something I welcome.
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I think reviews have lost a lot of their importance now because of the Internet; everyone is experiencing things at the same time.
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Hip-hop is more about attaining wealth. People respect success. They respect big. They don’t even have to like your music. If you’re big enough, people are drawn to you.
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I don’t have any fear of working with Samsung because I’m not gonna let them put a phone on my forehead; that’s just never gonna happen.
JAY-Z