Violent Environment Quotes

I learned to fire guns at the age of nine or so, but luckily was not out killing people. We zigzagged the streets to escape those trying to kill us. I guess it would have been a matter of time till I turned around with a gun myself, to go after those coming for us. But I was fortunate. The grenade incident was about an explosion which destroyed a section of my school, from a grenade that me and my cousin detonated by accident. We both lived to tell about it.

When I say I saw shotguns and pistols in the house, I saw them. It was what I grew up around.

The socialistic conception of the West was born in an environment reeking with violence.

I know I didn't want to get caught up in the cycle of drugs and violence that was around me. Deep down inside, I felt there was something better outside the situation I was in.

I grew up in a San Francisco very different from what many have experienced: a place called Plaza East, notoriously one of the most dangerous public housing developments in the City.

We know that there are several predisposing factors to gun violence: poverty, lack of education, lack of good parenting, lack of jobs, living in an environment where violence is seen every day, all the time. And children being born to children are likely to have all of these predisposing factors.

I certainly wasn't able to get it when I was a kid growing up on the Lower East Side; it was very hard at that time for me to balance what I really believed was the right way to live with the violence I saw all around me - I saw too much of it among the people I knew.

My childhood was pretty colorful; I like to use the word turbulent. But it was a great time to grow up, the '70s and '80s in Brooklyn, East Flatbush. It was culturally diverse: You had Italian culture, American culture, the Caribbean West Indian culture, the Hasidic Jewish culture. Everything was kind of like right there in your face. A lot of violence, you know, especially toward the '80s the neighborhood got really violent, but it made me who I am, it made me strong.

People don't understand that you can actually lose your life going to jail. There's more violence in the jail-house than there is on the streets.

My parents were very protective of me. Hockley had some crime, so my mum didn't want me out there, and my dad was the same. I would have to be in at a certain time, as there was a lot of violence surrounding our area.

I won't say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like: What I'm going to be if I grow up.

I was an outsider as a kid, and I grew up around a lot of violence.

In the land of the killers, a sinner's mind is a sanctum.

To be really obvious about something, if somebody straps an M1 on your shoulder and throws you in Iraq, you're going to get a sense of what the hell's going on there. Boy, you'll wake up fast when bullets are flying over your head.

Dad was involved in a lot of crime and the police were regularly coming to our door looking for him. From the age of three he always made sure I had a football and he'd make me play with much bigger kids. But he'd tell them, 'Kick him and if he moans he'll come in.' So I got taught to grow up very quickly.

I was raised in Washington, DC, very violent place. I grew up with violence. My introduction to music was violent. The years I've spent on tours, some of that was extremely violent.

It is the very survival of the streets that makes children pick up guns in Somalia, not some older, wide-eyed rebel leader. My intimate experiences during these years are something which I have shared with people through my music but am very careful about how they are addressed.