The more you try to suppress us, the larger we get.
I've never been competitive with anybody but myself.
A lot of times people would offer me movies and, because I'm a car freak, I'd look in a magazine and say, 'How much is this car? If you give me this car I'll show up and do the movie' I call 'em 'sports car flicks'.
I'm not going to allow anybody to hold a badge up over me or a cross or any other power symbol and say I'm going to kill you and you're just going to kneel down to me because I'm the law.
I think what's happenin' is that, with the overflow of music, it's been diluted. There was a time when people would go search out underground records. Now, underground means free, and people don't really care for it. So now artists tend to go more pop and look for the radio.
I think men, growing up, you have to go through some form of hardship. You've got to harden the metal.
If one person comes in and says, this is the way life should be, I think you're asking for chaos. I think you gotta let different people live different ways. It's a big world.
Rap is rock 'n' roll. Rock is when you push the buttons in the system; when you say, I'm not going along with what you're saying. That's rock, whether it's done with guitars, or it's done with just beats.
The truth is, everybody I've ever met who's successful is a workaholic.
I don't feel that rap has been respected as an art form. Because people have seen rappers rap off the top of their heads, they don't think it is difficult.
Ice-T in the music has done some outrageous things.
I'd say people are victims of circumstances and they're limited to the opportunities that they see. Even though there might be more opportunities, you might not see them. You might just think, "I don't have any options." You usually go to the dark side, in that situation.
It's like they want to shut rappers down. They want to silence us. The Supreme Court says it's OK for a white man to burn a cross in public. But nobody wants a black man to write a record about a cop killer.
I don't have to put out another rap record. I can do it at my casual pace.
Redemption means you just make a change in your life and you try to do right, versus what you were doing, which was wrong. So I think a lot of people get hooked on drugs and when they get over that addiction they go out and they try to talk to kids and they try to work in rehab centers.
I have no hatred for cops. I have hatred for racists and brutal people, but not necessarily the cops. The cops are just doing what they're told to do.
I want to be able to say that a rap career could be ten albums.
If you're really a rapper, you can't stop rapping.
I have to grow with my audience.
Hip-hop is the fountain of youth. You just don't grow up if you were there. My son's 20. I'm on the same channel he's on. We wear the same clothes, we feel the same thing. It's a weird, weird generation we're in right now.
Oh man, nobody is as tough as Mr T. Ice T is pretty tough though as well.
I think everybody wants to redeem themselves after they've done something that might be considered negative. I don't think anyone wants to go to the grave negative.
So from an actor's perspective, you really have no idea how you're acting.
I never know if the person I'm shaking hands with is coming to kill me. That's something you have to live with when you cross the lines.
You know, the radio never wanted you to speak about anything, so the music is kinda influenced by the hands of the radio which wants to homogenize it and dilute it and sanitize it. And for the most part, nobody's takin' the time to seek out the cats that are still tryin' to talk, so they have a difficult time being heard.
Los Angeles is a microcosm of the United States. If L.A. falls, the country falls.
If somebody wants to kill people, they don't need a gun to do it.
Being happily married, I’m more focused on what I’m doing. Ya know, one of my quotes is ‘love isn’t looking somebody in the eyes; it’s looking out in the same direction.
I've lectured at Stanford, Princeton & Harvard to name a few... I just might be smarter than YOU
I have to take what I say and make it heavy, so every single bar means something. And there's no riddles in my rhymes. Every single word means something.
That's basically the gangster code. Just be yourself. Just be you, dog. The easiest way to get your card plucked around a gangster is to be a fake. If we feel like you're trying too hard, if you're trying to act like you're from the street, you're in trouble.
I look at my career and I feel I have the potential to maybe mature into a Samuel Jackson-type older cat, and people will still respect me and say 'Yo, Ice-T was wild', into my old age. And why not? I don't necessarily think I'll be rapping in 10 years.
You can't just sing the song and live another life, you know. It's really difficult now because that's not what it's about. It's pop and pop just says that we could be actors. We could sing about stuff and not believe in it. It could be absolutely fraudulent and it doesn't really matter.
You could be a Green Beret and a kid could jump out from behind a building and hit you with a rock. No matter how tough you become in the military, there's a way to die: there's nothing safe about it.
Hollywood has its own way of telling stories. I was just telling stories that I was familiar with. And it's what I want to do in the future: I want to take my audio cinema and put it on the screen.
I was doing the wrong thing, at the time I thought I was doing the right thing. It's like if you're dealing with somebody who is high on drugs, they can look back at it and say, "Wow, I was destroying myself." But during the period, they think they're doing the right thing. You just have to let the smoke clear so you can see the whole picture.
It really really sunk into me when I went to Europe and they take rap so much more serious than we do here. That was the first time I ever heard rap considered folk music. And sometimes somebody will make you understand like, "Hey, what you doin' is serious, don't play it lightly 'cause it's changin' my life."
I couldn't possibly have lived all the things that Ice-T on the records lived.
When we say a rapper, a rapper can say a rhyme. But an MC can rock a party.
One of the things about powerful people is they have the ability to make it look easy.
When I was younger I never drank. I never drank, I never did any weed or drugs or anything because I felt it would compromise my position. I was an orphan, and I had a feeling like if I ever hit the ground I may never get back up.
A lot of the younger kids now can rap, but they're scared of the crowd. Mastery of that stage is an MC. I don't know if you've seen any great MCs on stage but when you do it's like wow, this is more than the words to rhymes.
You know, you'd hide behind a Public Enemy or Ice Cube, or Bruce Springsteen, or U2, because they spoke for you. But now everybody's bloggin'. I heard somebody say, "Blogging is just graffiti with punctuation." Everyone's an authority so there's nobody in power, 'cause everyone thinks they're in power.
I'm just disillusioned with the hip-hop sound right now. It's too materialistic. You know, I'm the kind of guy ... I can't do that. If you track my movement, you'll never see a picture of me with any girl that wasn't mine, or my own car. My jewelry, my clothes. What kind of gangsta rapper has a stylist? A stylist?!
Being cool is when you win, you don't get too happy; and when you lose, you don't get too mad.
I've never been a cop hater. You know, when I was breaking the law, the cops were the opponent. I just thought I could outsmart them.
With the invention of the blog and all this Internet stuff, everybody has an opinion; everybody has a voice. In fact, there was a time when the average person didn't have a voice so you had to pick an artist to speak for you.
I don't watch daytime television, I have a job, I work and, you know, I think daytime television is really for women.
Winners have to absorb losses.
The best way to compliment an emcee is to say his lyrics. That's how you say, "Hello."
Rapping is a vocal delivery, so you can do it without being part of hip-hop and not knowing what hip-hop is about.
You've got the Wall Street situation, the sub-prime situation. You've got a black president. We've got wars. We've got unemployment. But the music doesn't reflect that. And I challenge anybody to show me a music that's on the radio that reflects that.
...As an artist, you need the naysayers and the nonbelievers to add fuel to your creative fire.
I've been pulled out of my nice new car and laid out in the street by the police, interrogated and then have them get in the car and roll off leaving me lying in the street without even saying 'Get up.' The humiliation that they can put on a black man because they determine that you ain't got the money.
You have the core hip-hop, which would just be beats and breaks, more something like what you hear with DJ Premier. Then you get into the more highly produced hip-hop, which is something like what DJ Khaled does. But at some point, it starts to get kind of pop.
An MC is somebody who can control the crowd. An MC is a master of ceremonies so not only can you say your rap, you can rock the party.
I'm on the front line and I am a rapper.
I've always been a person that, if I'm with a woman, she's in the picture.
I'm at a point where I don't have to wait for the income from the record to survive, so I'm in a comfortable zone, but I'll make rap records as long as I feel I have something to rap about.
I've never read for a movie, I've always been given them.
I like crime movies where the crime is so incredible that, attractive as it seems, you don't wanna do it because it's just too dangerous.
I don't rhyme for the sake of riddlin'. If I say it, I gotta be able to back it up.
Who can protect themselves from betrayal? The day your brother wakes up and plans to do you dirty, there's no defense against that.
The best way to listen to the album is to put it on, get some Moet, lay back with your boys, and kick it.
With acting, you have to take it seriously because the other actors are putting in a lot of effort - and if you say, 'I'm just bullshitting here', it's like dissing 'em.
Any New York group can come to L.A. and sell out every show, but an L.A. group who goes to New York might not do the same because the audience hasn't been introduced to the group.
I was a pretty bad person early in my life.
I wouldn't write about sh*t I don't know. You won't hear me write about politics in Africa and stuff, because I don't know enough about it. And I would never rap about something I can't back up.
Passion makes the world go round. Love just makes it a safer place.
Dog's just want to sniff an ass and eat some food.
When you hit the wall, it's how fast you come back.
There was a time when people would go search out underground records. Now, underground means free, and people don't really care for it. So now artists tend to go more pop and look for the radio. You know, the radio never wanted you to speak about anything, so the music is kinda influenced by the hands of the radio which wants to homogenize it and dilute it and sanitize it. And for the most part, nobody's takin' the time to seek out the cats that are still tryin' to talk, so they have a difficult time being heard, like Chuck D said.
I hate to get on the racial thing because that's something I've always been totally against. But the problem with the media is that they think that the word rock means white and the word rap means black.
There's people out there with nuclear bombs and yet we've got all these politicians trying to make a political platform based on a record. Isn't it ridiculous?
You can't just sing the song and live another life.
When I recorded my first album, my ego didn't let me believe that what I was gonna say on the mic, anyone would really care about. But then when I found out that they did, I started to take it more seriously.
I started writing rhymes first and then put it to the music. I figured out I could lock it to the beat better if I heard the music first. I like to get a lot of tracks, put the track up and let the music talk to me about what it's about.
I think when people say 'real hip-hop,' they want it more buried in the streets. They want it more connected to the streets and the grime and the roughness of the streets. They don't want the fluff.
I'm very much against the anonymity of bloggers and social media. I just hate it and I think it's really cowardly.
I've been in crime for a long time and I know that the actual move isn't the actual crime: the crime continues [afterwards].
There's a point where a cop pulls you out of that car and starts abusing you or beating on you and at that moment he is no longer within the law.
I was a full-blown street cat. I was trying to hustle my way. I thought I was going to hustle my way to a mansion or something. I was doing pretty good, but I didn't realize that there was no way to win that game.
You can't get what you want all the time in life.
I'm pretty open book, I'm also the kind of person that will say, 'That's none of your business,' too.
Redemption just means you just make a change in your life and you try to do right, versus what you were doing, which was wrong.
Everybody is doing you a favor when you're doing a documentary. You can't pressure them into it.
Now everybody's bloggin'. I heard somebody say, "Blogging is just graffiti with punctuation." Everyone's an authority so there's nobody in power, 'cause everyone thinks they're in power.
AIDS is such a scary thing and it's also the kind of thing that you think won't happen to you. It can happen to you and it's deadly serious.
That's one of the first things that comes out of young people's mouths when they're in love. FOREVER. And that's cool, it's all good-until you get old enough to realize what forever is.
My father died early. My mother died early. I started hanging with the gangs. I'm on the streets; I'm committing crimes. And the music came along, and this music just took me on a different road.
It's like a paradox. For one side, being popularized rap got better and the other side of it got worse. It's very pop and it's very different now. When you make it as pop and as soft as it is, it lacks its integrity. It lacks its accountability. It lacks a lot of other things that came from that dangerous time in hip hop.
Ultimately I am happy that everybody is embracing hip hop and the sounds from the streets.
My mother passed when I was in the third grade, my father when I was in the seventh, and that's when I was shipped to Los Angeles to live with an aunt.
Real men hold themselves accountable for stuff.
I've always been a person that, if I'm with a woman, she's in the picture. Even my son's mom, she was on my early (album) covers.
It's just that when you heard hip-hop, no matter where you were, it was a culture that kind of made you want to try to be part of it. Whether you thought you were an artist, whether you thought you could be a DJ, whether you thought you could breakdance, or whether you thought you could rap. It was the kind of culture that had a lot of open doors.
You know, I say in my lyrics, "Every word I write will be analyzed by somebody white." It's just that I know that this sh*t is just not gonna fall on deaf ears.
It's not about being mad at everything. It's about being really mad at the right things.
I write rhymes with addition and algebra, mental geometry.
Military is a great place for a jock. That's the first thing they test you, they test you physically. If you can run, if you can do the pushups, it's not as hard a transition. If you can't do that, you're going to have a problem because they're going to really work it out of you or work it into you.
A lot of people play single to work some angle. I'm always about keeping it real. If that's how I'm living, that's how I'm living.
I'm like a monkey. You don't let go of one branch until you get a hold of the other.
Hip-hop is a competition culture. It's based around, "My DJ is better than you. My graffiti artist is better than you."
If you get into crime you gotta know that everybody's a criminal and everybody's a liar, and everybody has the potential to backstab you, because it's not an honest profession. So don't go into crime and look for honesty.
When the President (of the United States) mentions your name in anger, you know the sh*t has hit the fan!
People think I'll kill you if you make a joke. I compare it to Clint Eastwood. I've only seen Clint Eastwood in movies. You think if you make a joke to Eastwood, he might shoot you.
You can't do an impersonation of somebody nobody knows.
I'm a big Brad Pitt fan. He's really talented. I think a lot of men are intimidated by him, saying he's just a pretty boy or whatever, but he is a bad man. I think he can act.
Arnold Schwarzenegger blew away dozens of cops as the Terminator. But I don't hear anybody complaining about that.
When I got a chance to rap, I just busted my ass. When I got a chance to act, I busted my ass. Anytime I get a chance. I'm not wasting time. I won't do it if I'm not doing it 110 percent. You've got to work hard if you want to play hard. I like to play, but I know I gotta bust my ass.
Rap music came along and saved my life. I started to tell the stories of the streets and that was my way out.
When you start a business, go for the lowest hanging fruit.
I ain't got no beef with east coast, I think it's just being hyped up.
The next day, I got a phone call from him and he told me to come and read for a movie called New Jack City. So I went over there and they told me I was gonna wear dreads and play a cop.
Before rap came along, I was, actually, actively in the streets; getting in trouble, doing the wrong thing.
Diet food is for lazy people.
As an actor, you can do what you want with your role. That's why they hire you; to take the role and make it real.
I was born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in Summit, an upscale town in north Jersey. There was this tiny area of Summit where most of the black families lived. My parents and I lived in a duplex house on Williams Street.
There's a lot of films I've done I don't ever wanna see again.
Half the rhymes you write, you're saying that you're better than the other MC. That's how we keep the craft sharp.
There is no such thing as a normal family so don't trip off it, just deal with it.
If you believe that I'm a cop killer, you believe David Bowie is an astronaut.
in the mornin' po-lice at my door Fresh adidas squeak across the bathroom floor Out the back window.. I make a escape Don't even get a chance to grab my old school tape
A good emcee will rhyme a lot of different ways. Don't limit yourself.
I'm a far cry from politically correct, because I don't really care what the political views are. I don't care what the people say. I'll say my opinion. That will always make you controversial.
