First Quotes

If the first button of one’s coat is wrongly buttoned, all the rest will be crooked.

By the time I got to record my first album, I was 26, I didn’t need pen or paper – my memory had been trained just to listen to a song, think of the words, and lay them to tape.

National security – the military is the first thing we should spend money on. You have to fully fund that first. And then you should be paying for everything else.

How can one come to possess great faith? Now listen, here is the answer to that: First, the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear. Faith must grow by soil, moisture, and exercise.

Stillmatic’ is the rebirth of ‘Illmatic,’ my first debut album to come out in 1994. ‘Stillmatic’ is me coming full circle in my career and with everything, and just bringing pure hip-hop back.

Economic prosperity is not so much a material problem; it is, first of all, an intellectual, spiritual, and moral problem.

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

They recite their sacred books, although the fact informs me that these are a fiction from first to last.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

Ed Sullivan brought me to TV first in 1952, then Garry Moore’s program gave me a lot of confidence and freedom.