Ice Cube Quotes

South Central is just who I am. Even though I have a nice house, nice family, the rest of my generation is still in South Central L.A. My cousins, my brothers, my sisters, they don't wanna move out.

American society as a whole can never achieve the outer-reaches of potential, so long as it tolerates the inner cities of despair.

I still live in Inglewood and have a great relationship with my Mexican family.

As a senior at Princeton, I felt like the whole world was open to me. In our country, that's not a given. We aspire to be a place of equal opportunity, and yet where you're born determines your prospects.

I think 'The Wire' really is relatable. It reflects an ongoing issue across America, about inaccuracies in major cities between rich and the poor and some of the things that go on behind the red tape of council and government bodies.

It's important for me to go back into the ghetto, where I'm from. I still get my oxygen from there. I don't live in the ghetto anymore, but every time I go back, I'm still seeing the same things that I lived.

There's not a lot of hope coming from the inner city.

Contrary to what President Obama said in his inaugural address, going on Medicare and food stamps does not strengthen us. Just ask people who are fourth-generation welfare recipients.

We are lagging far behind comparable countries in overcoming the disadvantages Indigenous people face.

I know two L.A.s. Half my life was around the house my folks had for 46 years at 3rd and Norton. The other half was in Boyle Heights on the Eastside, working with gang members.

I have spent my life judging the distance between American reality and the American dream.

The only way I see the world now is through coming out of and growing up and living in Somalia. In the time of war, everyone was basically trying to live and manage the best they could. But you also had another period which was not a hard time at all - it was just a beautiful time. I lived in both eras.

It's not white versus black any more, it's haves versus have-nots. Unless the black middle-classes unite to promote the interests of the black underclass, tension between them is inevitable. What we, the black middle class have to do, is think of a strategy to avert that.

Those who have won the ovarian lottery by being born in an advanced society to loving parents have a special obligation to help restore the American Dream.

I myself am from a very poor background; I experienced firsthand poverty in this country, and that is not unrelated to my desire, from the moment I became president, to make a priority of poverty reduction in this country.

Bums are the well-to-do of this day. They didn't have as far to fall.

I think there's an element where people get very comfortable in their ghetto. Which is fair enough.

I started out young and idealistic, and it was all about social justice and fair distribution of resources. I didn't understand why everybody couldn't be equally prosperous.

I grew up in northwest London on a council estate. My parents are Irish immigrants who came over here when they were very young and worked in menial jobs all their lives, and I'm one of many siblings.

In the end, we may be hurting the very people we should be concerned about - the inner-city poor, those who already have to live with many risks in their daily lives, those who do not have clout here in Washington.

You leap over the wall of one ghetto and find yourself in another ghetto.

One of the things we tell ourselves as African-Americans is if we work hard, play by the rules, we do start back a little ways, but if we can be twice as good, somehow we can escape history and heritage and legacy.

I have lived in Chicago all my life and I still say we have no ghettos in Chicago.

Equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exists… we are steering a steady course toward economic oligarchy, if we are not there already”

Loneliness is not a problem in traditional societies. People spend their lives in or near the place where they were born, and they remain surrounded by relatives and childhood companions.