Ice T Quotes

Musicians always come off sounding a little bit pretentious, and a little bit... I don't know, hypocritical, from what they do, talking about strong issues.

I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, 'Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!'

I didn't want to be told what to do. I don't want to water down my music to fit into their formats. I know what rock and roll is to me, but everything's turning into one big commercial.

Imagine if someone like John Lennon or Bob Marley, Sid Vicious, Picasso, whomever, were doing their work, and some corporation, some CEO, some branding entity was saying to you, 'Well, you can do that, but you've got to remove this aspect of your work.' There would no longer be that purity anymore.

I don't want to be 'box-office girl,' but I don't want to be 'that indie girl' either.

I find rebellion packaged by a major corporation a little hard to take seriously.

I think there's always a call for people who are bucking the norm. But I don't expect it to happen now because I think that more than ever the entertainment industry is trying to serve as a distraction, to keep people from thinking too hard.

I would urge all bands that say they only care about credibility and don't care about money to send Gene Simmons every dollar that they don't want. I'd be happy to take it off them.

Philosophers are men hired by the well-to-do to prove that everything is all right.

Habitually I go without a vest so that I can’t be accused of standing for the vested interests.

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

There are .. two choices: obedience to institutional authority or radical dissent from it.

I was never your average artist, happy to do whatever the record company told me.

I've always said it's easier for bands to make a hard stance - like, we don't do commercials or whatever, blah blah blah - when you've sold billions of records. It's super-easy to be righteous when you're rich.

There's been many times when a producer will say, 'I don't think you want to say that.' We were told we shouldn't be so brutally honest about songwriting or radio or the industry.

You're just one of the guys who fills a suit, and that's what's drilled into you by the record company and the management - 'You're lucky to have it. Now shut your mouth.' I get where that comes from, but it takes time to shake it off.

It's really weird how the rock world is quickly becoming like the jazz world. How if you do OK, or get a tiny bit of success, that's considered a sellout, whether you did anything different or not.

Major labels don't want to take chances on cooler, indie kind of things. People only know, unfortunately, what they're being spoon-fed.

Rock and roll has become entertainment that just says what the consumer wants to hear. There's no more edge or rebellion that sets it apart from the norm.

Visaaranai' reflects a stark reality from which you cannot shut yourself out: that is its success.

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.

But I never want to get to the point where I write a safe song or one that represents my sense of a subject in order to appear civilized.

The conflict between art and politics... cannot and must not be solved.

Often times, being in a popular thing means that you have to compromise your own acting.