Top 90 Ghetto Quotes

For thugs from the ghetto, violence is a way of life – it’s what helps you survive.

Those of us who preach the Scriptures, along with being nourished by it ourselves, have to figure out along with our congregations how we can incarnate the gospel in our community, or we will preach to a religious ghetto.

The Democrats take the black vote for granted so they don’t have to appeal to anything… I haven’t heard Mrs. Clinton talk about the urban pathologies in the American ghetto that are the result of progressive urban policies – failed policies.

Why shouldn’t rap be esoteric, able to take in current events, history and criticism? I guess it’s this old idea of containment – that rappers, because they’re black, can’t and shouldn’t aspire to look outside the ghetto for influence.

I’ve done a handful of voiceover and on-camera jobs where I’ve been asked to ‘be blacker.’ That’s code for sassier, more ghetto, more neck rolls and snaps.

I went to a prep school in Chicago, and my dad and mom worked really hard – even though we lived in the ghetto – to get me to there. A lot of it had to do with ‘Stand and Deliver’ and ‘Dead Poet’s Society.’ It does help you. It inspires you. It definitely did for me.

It was an amazing childhood, despite what you might think about black struggle and poor neighbourhoods and the ghetto. My mother was an educated, budding linguist who really inspired us. Some of the leading indicators of success in the world have to do with how many books are in the house when you’re a kid.

I don’t think of myself as a poor deprived ghetto girl who made good. I think of myself as somebody who from an early age knew I was responsible for myself, and I had to make good.

I don’t get nothing but love. In every ghetto all over the world. Nothing but love. They respect that I came outta there and I’m doing it the right way. You can’t do nothing but respect that.

I’m not a snob. I like ghetto rap and punk rock and all that stuff.

I change my style maybe every month. I’m, like, punk one month, ghetto fab the next, classy the next. I’m just young and finding out who I am.

I grew up in the ghetto, and the thing is when there were problems, I knew when to get away.

I lived in the projects and the ghetto, and turned the negative into a positive.

We don’t want to create a literary ghetto in which black writers are only allowed to write black characters and women writers are put on ‘girl books.’

Not all cops are bad, but this kind of harassment has been going on for years in the ghetto.

My family didn’t have any money growing up. I’m just a girl from the ghetto; from Indio, California.

There are so many slices to the African-American experience. I mean, I have the whole ghetto pedigree. My mom was in jail, I didn’t have any money, and I didn’t go to a fancy college. But that’s not the type of story I want to tell or feel the need to tell on film.

There’s no success story. Everybody’s got a ghetto story. You always want to make it bigger than what it is.

Every ghetto you go to, Latinos and blacks are the two people that are together. We don’t look at each other in any different way, like ‘He’s black; I’m Latino.’ I look at us as one.

We’re not just three dumb girls from the ghetto who got lucky.

I had to go to an audition for a rather large West End musical set on a Greek island. I didn’t realise that you had to go with sheet music to give to the pianist. I took a Mark Bolan CD, a small ghetto blaster and then sang along. It was absolutely appalling.

There was no person, whether they thought I was too fat, too black, too country, too ghetto, too New York, too thug or too whatever! Nobody ultimately had the say over whether or not I was going to make it.

Nobody wanted to be in business with Death Row because, unfortunately, they felt there was an element there that could be dangerous. But I just knew they had great music and that they were a bunch of guys who wanted to make it out of the ghetto. That’s something I can understand.

When I first heard rap, I wasn’t quick to be critical. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but I had a feeling it was a reflection of what’s been happening in the ghetto.

‘Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto’ is a surprise and a fresh way of looking at Harlem, connecting the black district with the architecture of its historical past.

When we came out, they just labelled us ‘ratchet music’ cos we said ‘ratchet’ a lot. Ratchet means that’s it’s ghetto, but I would just call the music we’re making just good music.

I grew up originally in Rochester. It was where I was born and a very tough neighbourhood with a lot of violence. I consider myself lucky. When I was aged 11, in 1998, Dad moved us to a suburban area from what was a ghetto area. It gave me a chance of survival.

I grew up with pretty much nothing – in the hood, the ghetto – whatever you want to call it.

She’s like a Barbie, then she wants to be a superhero, or coming out of a spaceship and everything’s pink. She makes a certain move that’s ghetto hood mixed with a little robot so its like I’m evolving Nicki Minaj and developing her style. She’s fearless, and I love her.

I was brought up in this part of Detroit that they used to call the ghetto.

Both my father and mother were survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. Apart from my parents, every family member on both sides was exterminated by the Nazis.

2Pac made me want to rap, he made me want to speak my ghetto story and not be ashamed of it.

I think suspense should be like any other color on a writer’s palette. I suppose I’m in the minority but I think it’s crazy for ‘literary fiction’ to divorce itself from stories that are suspenseful, and assign anything with cops or spies or criminals to some genre ghetto.

You leap over the wall of one ghetto and find yourself in another ghetto.

If you live in a ghetto and really want not to just change your life and your family’s life but change your ghetto’s life, make your ghetto a good neighbourhood, learn science; try to be like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

I’m still ghetto. That’s not going to change. I’m never going to change my culture.

I don’t want to play everyone’s best friend. I don’t want to play the role of a girl struggling in the ghetto. It’s not that that story isn’t important, but I saw patterns, and was like, ‘I don’t relate to these people.’

I feel like I’m going to be like the ghetto ‘Gilmore Girls’ because I feel like this child is going to be more mature than I am because just look at me!

I’m enjoying the money, the big house, the cars; what ghetto kid wouldn’t?

Ghetto isn’t a place. Ghetto is more in the mind and how you feel about your life.

‘Be faithful to your roots’ is the liberal version of ‘Stay in your ghetto.’

Living in Barcelona, I have my own little ghetto utopia. There are 3,000 ghost towns in Spain, and I’ve used the images of them a lot in my backdrops for my solo spoken-word stuff. The ghost towns could be from two buildings to 40 – things died out, or there were plagues, the roads don’t lead there, whatever.

Our house was in the middle of town; behind it was the ghetto, from which Jews were sent to concentration camps.

We were just expressing stuff that happens in the ghetto, just being like reporters.

I’m living proof that you can make it out of the ghetto.

If the Jews had issues with the Polish people then why during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, did the Jewish underground hang two flags from the bunker – the Polish flag and the flag of the Jewish people? Why? They did it because they felt part of Polish society and that is how we view them as well.

I didn’t realise I lived in the ghetto until we moved out.

We used to go to Palm Springs, ditch school when I was in eleventh grade, and go hang out poolside with our ghetto blaster and listen to Pat Metheny ‘Offramp’ and kind of trip out on a lot of his music.

If I could help every ghetto, I would.

The trouble with us is that the ghetto of the Middle Ages and the children of the twentieth century have to live under one roof.

When ghetto living seems normal, you have no shame, no privacy.

Why is it so hard for people to believe that white people are poor?! I wouldn’t say I lived in a ghetto; I’d say I lived in the ‘hood. The same friends I had back then are the same people on tour with me now.

It’s dangerous to be a child star, but it’s dangerous to be a child in the ghetto, or to be a child at school being bullied.

I bristle a little when the argument for film gets put into the nostalgia ghetto. Film is still the highest quality and best-looking image capture medium available. I don’t think it always will be. The digital image will get better, and it will eventually surpass the quality of the film image, but it isn’t there yet.

The year the bus drivers went on strike in Pittsburgh, I was twenty-three and living on the edge of the city in a neighborhood that was on the verge of becoming a ghetto. I had just been fired from a good job as a cartographer in a design studio where I had worked for about four months.

When I would go to the barrio, people saw me as a rich person, but when I’m around rich people, they see me as someone from the ghetto. It’s all perceptions. I like moving between worlds. I feel equally comfortable in both.