Janice Anthony > Janice's Quotes

“Only God can judge me so I'm gone, either love me or leave me alone.”
― Jay-Z

“Jealousy’s a weak emotion.”
― Jay-Z

“We change people through conversation, not through censorship.”
― Jay-Z, Decoded

“Identity is a prison you can never escape, but the way to redeem your past is not to run from it, but to try to understand it, and use it as a foundation to grow.”
― Jay-Z, Decoded

“The art of rap is deceptive. It seems so straightforward and personal and real that people read it completely literally, as raw testimony or autobiography. And sometimes the words we use, nigga, bitch, motherfucker, and the violence of the images overwhelms some listeners. It's all white noise to them till they hear a bitch or a nigga and then they run off yelling "See!" and feel vindicated in their narrow conception of what the music is about.”
― Jay-Z, Decoded

“I believe you can speak things into existence.”
― Jay-Z, Decoded

“I'm a hustler, baby; I sell water to a well!”
― Jay-Z

“Life is for living, not living uptight, see ya somewhere up in the sky.”
― Jay-Z

“Hip-hop has always been controversial, and for good reason. When you watch a children's show and they've got a muppet rapping about the alphabet, it's cool, but it's not really hip-hop. The music is meant to be provocative - which doesn't mean it's necessarily obnoxious, but it is (mostly) confrontational, and more than that, it's dense with multiple meanings. Great rap should have all kinds of unresolved layers that you don't necessarily figure out the first time you listen to it. Instead it plants dissonance in your head. You can enjoy a song that knocks in the club or has witty punch lines the first time you hear it. But great rap retains mystery. It leaves shit rattling around in your head that won't make sense till the fifth or sixth time through. It challenges you.

Which is the other reason hip-hop is controversial: People don't bother trying to get it. The problem isn't in the rap or the rapper or the culture. The problem is that so many people don't even know how to listen to the music.”
― Jay-Z, Decoded

“A poet's mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level.”
― Jay-Z, Decoded

“If the beat is time, flow is what we do with that time, how we live through it. The beat is everywhere, but every life has to find its own flow.”
― Jay-Z, Decoded

“Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk. Martin Luther King walked so Obama could run. Obama's running so we all can fly.”
― Jay-Z

“You know the type: loud as a motorbike but wouldn't bust a grape in a fruit fight.”
― Jay-Z

“I couldn't even think about wanting to be something else; I wouldn't let myself visualize another life. But I wrote because I couldn't stop. It was a release, a mental exercise, a way of keeping sane.”
― Jay-Z, Decoded

“[T]he truth is you don't need some external demon to take control of you to turn you into a raging, money-obsessed sociopath, you only need to let loose the demons you already have inside of you.”
― Jay-Z, Decoded

“Hip-hop is a perfect mix between poetry and boxing.”
― Jay-Z, Decoded

“[T]he truth is that drug addicts have a disease. It only takes a short time in the streets to realize that out-of-control addiction is a medical problem, not a form of recreational or criminal behavior. And the more society treats drug addiction as a crime, the more money drug dealers will make "relieving" the suffering of the addicts.”
― Jay-Z, Decoded

“Everyone needs a chance to evolve.”
― Jay-Z

“You could name practically any problem in the hood and there'd be a rap song for you.”
― Jay-Z, Decoded

“Which is the other reason hip-hop is controversial: People don't bother trying to get it. The problem isn't in the rap or the rapper or the culture. The problem is that so many people don't even know how to listen to the music.”
― Jay-Z, Decoded

“But that's a good match for the way I've always approached life. I've always believed in motion and action, in following connections wherever they take me, and in not getting entrenched. My life has been more poetry than prose, more about unpredictable leaps and links than simple steady movement, or worse, stagnation. It's allowed me to stay open to the next thing without feeling held back by a preconceived notion of what I'm supposed to be doing next. Stories have ups and downs and moments of development followed by moments of climax; the storyteller has to keep it all together, which is an incredible skill. But poetry is all climax, every word and line pops with the same energy as the whole; even the spaces between the words can feel charged with potential energy. It fits my style to rhyme with high stakes riding on every word and to fill every pause with pressure and possibility. And maybe I just have ADD, but I also like my rhymes to stay loose enough to follow whatever ideas hijack my train of thought, just like I like my mind to stay loose enough to absorb everything around me.”
― Jay-Z, Decoded

“I'm not afraid of dying I'm afraid of not trying”
― Jay-Z

“No matter where you go you are what you are player and you can try to change but that's just the top layer man you was who you was before you got here”
― Jay-Z

“But this is one of the things that makes rap at its best so human. It doesn't force you to pretend to be only one thing or another, to be a saint or a sinner. It recognizes that you can be true to yourself and still have unexpected dimensions and opposing ideas. Having a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other is the most common thing in the world. The real bullshit is when you act like you don't have contradictions inside you, that you're so dull and unimaginative that your mind never changes or wanders into strange, unexpected places.”
― Jay-Z, Decoded

“I'm here to tell niggas it ain't all swell.
There's Heaven then there's Hell niggas
One day your cruisin' in your seven,
Next day your sweatin', forgettin' your lies,
Alibis ain't matchin' up, bullshit catchin' up
Hit with the RICO, they repoed your vehicle
Everything was all good just a week ago
'Bout to start bitchin' ain't you?
Ready to start snitchin' ain't you?
I forgive you. Weak ass, hustlin' just ain't you
Aside from the fast cars
Honeys that shake they ass in bars
You know you wouldn't be involved
With the Underworld dealers, carriers of mac-millers
East coast bodiers, West coast cap-peelers
Little monkey niggas turned gorillas.”
― Jay-Z, Decoded

“When you step outside of school and have to teach yourself about life, you develop a different relationship to information. I've never been a purely linear thinker. You can see it in my rhymes. My mind is always jumping around, restless, making connections, mixing and matching ideas, rather than marching in a straight line. That's why I'm always stressing focus. My thoughts chase each other from room to room in my head if I let them, so sometimes I have to slow myself down.”
― Jay-Z, Decoded

“either love me or leave me alone."
— jay-z”
― Jay-Z, Decoded

“You can put a new shirt on your back, slide a fresh chain around your neck, and accumulate all the money and power in the world, but at the end of the day those are just layers. Money and power don't change you, they just further expose your true self.”
― Jay-Z, Decoded

“Housing projects are a great metaphor for the government's relationship to poor folks: these huge islands built mostly in the middle of nowhere, designed to warehouse lives. People are still people, though, so we turned the projects into real communities, poor or not. We played in fire hydrants and had cookouts and partied, music bouncing off concrete walls. But even when we could shake off the full weight of those imposing buildings and try to just live, the truth of our lives and struggle was still invisible to the larger country. The rest of the country was freed of any obligation to claim us. Which was fine, because we weren't really claiming them, either.”
― Jay-Z, Decoded

“A wise man told me don't argue with fools. Cause people from a distance can't tell who is who.”
― Jay-Z