Street Knowledge Quotes

Sometimes street knowledge can be as important as book knowledge.

I'm amazed now whenever I go back to London. I'm like, 'Wow. I used to kind of swing up these streets when I knew how this machine worked.' And then when you don't, you lose that. You need to get your license back. I do know how to plant a garden and keep chickens, but I don't know how to do much else.

One thing I noticed working in the Bronx is that leaders come in the craziest places. They don't always show up at community board meetings. Sometimes it's just the guys on the corner that the boys on the block respect.

Rap is from the streets and I'm from the streets. That's why a lot of people accept me.

The smartest billionaires I know never finished high school. I got my degree and my doctorate on the street and an advanced degree in jail.

Some of the best navigators in the world are London taxi cab drivers. They have to learn 25,000 streets and how to get from one to the other.

I'm from the street. We all know that.

Just because someone has gone to an elite school and college does not make him smarter than the person who has grown up on street knowledge.

You simply can't get inside the heads of other people and say to them, 'Look, I went through some rough times.' It's impossible to explain everything the streets taught me, and that was quite a lot.

Rappers are usually rapping about knowledge they think people need to get by in the world. If there's no movement that gives the idea that the knowledge people need is how to take over the system, what they see is that people need to know how to hustle; people need to know how to survive.

At a time when the respectable bourgeois youngsters of my generation were college freshmen, oppressed by simian sophomores and affronted with balderdash daily and hourly by chalky pedagogues, I was at large in a wicked seaport of half a million people, with a front seat at every public show, as free of the night as of day, and getting earfuls of instruction in a hundred giddy arcana, none of them taught in schools.... [But] if I neglected the humanities, I was meanwhile laying in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer, or a midwife.

In opposition to sex education: Let the kids today learn it where we did - in the gutter.

It take a certain type of man to teach, to be far from hood but to understand the streets.

The man on the street, he knows who Beethoven is, he knows who Mozart is.

They say somebody's 'street smart.' I feel like, if I got intelligence, it's just a country smart.

Maino is an artist that I feel walks what he talks - you can tell what he raps about and what he's been through is very similar. You've got a lot of rappers that rap about what they've heard or seen, but I think Maino is one of the rappers that has actually lived it.

Gotta keep your ear to the streets. That's Rule No. 1.

My music is genuine, and I'm talking about stuff that no one else - no one my age, anyway, in the game - is talking about. Nobody. I'm the only one really stating facts and speaking with real street knowledge.

I don't want my kids to be on the streets period. I want my kids to be nerds. I want them to be book smart or playing sports - I don't want them to know nothing about the streets.

Word on road is the clique about to blow. You ain't gotta run and tell nobody they already know

I was born in D.C. on 8th Street. I know what's up. I know what time it is. I used to hang out in Brooklyn and in the Bronx as a teenager. I know what the real world is like.

My mom and dad, although they may not have had a lot of formal education, they were two of the most brilliant people that I know.

The idea that any law enforcement agency or person would ever know these gang members better than Homeboy Industries is impossible.

What I learned about the mob wasn't through lectures at the academy.

The streets helps you a lot in music, cause it let's you know that you can't trust nobody and that nobody's gonna wait for you. You can't just sit there with dope in your pocket and think that people are gonna come to you. You gotta put the product out there.