Inner City Struggles Quotes

People say 'The Wire's bleak, y'know, but I see it as a love letter to Baltimore, and it's one written in a very strange and complex way.

When it comes to Baltimore I want to say that it's actually a lot worse than what you see in 'The Wire.'

I'm from the inner city of Buffalo.

In Chicago, a lot of people don't really got nothing to live for. Everybody can't ball. Everybody can't rap. Nobody is really doing those activities. There's nothing to do but the streets.

I've lived most of my life in Manhattan, but I lived in Brooklyn for a while as a kid. I went to junior high school there. Girls in Brooklyn have to be tough - I mean real tough - just to get by. It's life in the combat zone.

Now we just showin' and provin' that there's a ghetto everywhere you go.

Mama raised a hellraiser why cry, That's just life in the ghetto, do or die.

Now some folks say that we should be glad for what we have. Tell me, would you be happy in Village Ghetto Land?

On a cold and gray Chicago morning another little baby child is born in the ghetto, and his Mama cries.

Gangsta rap often reaches higher than its ugliest, lowest common denominator, misogyny, violence, materialism and sexual transgression are not its exclusive domain. At its best, this music draws attention to complex dimensions of ghetto life ignored by most Americans. Indeed, gangsta rap's in-your-face style may do more to force America to confront crucial social problems than a million sermons or political speeches.

I was in Vancouver, and I was in what I was told was the poorest neighborhood in North America - which I find very hard to believe because has anyone here ever been to Detroit?

Gangsta rappers, they call them. Not nearly as gangsta as the things that inspire them.. you know, a gangsta government that we operate under.

P Street in D.C. is one of the worst areas in the city. Some of the things I saw, the things I experienced, the things we came through, really gave me a whole new perspective on life.

This film [Chi-Raq]is a declaration. It's a scream. It's a warning. And I can really break it down to one scene. That's the scene where we have the eulogy and sermon that is given by the great John Cusack.

Chicago is a rough city. It made me raw.

Coming from the inner city of Cleveland and growing up you never expected a street to be named after you or anything. It's a special honor.

I grew up in the inner city. It wasn't a joke.

Sometimes you almost have to laugh to keep from crying to deal with the pain associated with the 'hood.

How could you be from the ghetto and be a rat?

I'm from a rough place: the Bronx.

The single 'Tha Block Is Hot' was a song that was true to life.

Reagan's neglect of the inner city is responsible for hiphop. Hiphop is created thanks to the conditions that crack set: easy money but a lot of work, the violence involved, the stories it produced. Crack helped birth hiphop.

I do remember the numbers runners, I do remember the poverty and bread lines. Harlem stays with you forever.

I go to the favelas in Brazil. It's the same in the South Side of Chicago. It's the same, or just more violent. We're trying to get them to stop selling dope. You see kids with AK-47s, and nine-year-olds with nine millimeters. You know, they don't play. They make us look like nuns.

Urban America is like a foreign country in a sense.