Top 20 Saul Williams Quotes

Hip-hop is still cool at a party. But to me, hip-hop has never been strictly a party; it is also there to elevate consciousness.

There’s no doubt in my mind that ‘Slam‘ is going to be huge. It’s a film about the power of language. People are going to see this and get blown away.

What’s wrong with hip-hop is the system that controls the definition of it. There needs to be more balance on the airwaves.

The only reason I’ve been so critical of hip-hop is because I’ve always been aware of the effect that it has, and the reflection that it gives of the African-American community.

We all have different relationships with music. But the music is always there.

I didn’t ever want to make a rap album. I considered it too limiting. Now that’s exactly what I’ve gone and done.

I have an acquired taste for language, yet it is seldom an actual focus of mine.

I remember back in the day when Chuck D called hip-hop the ‘black people‘s CNN.’ Well now, hip-hop is more like Fox News. It’s biased, and highly suspect.

Legislation won‘t necessarily start a riot. But the right song can make someone pick up a chair.

Jay Z and President Bush have a lot in common, that same brash confidence.

‘Niggy Tardust’ is the voice of a generation, a generation that does not define itself simply by what it’s born into.

We cannot continually barricade ourselves under some falsified idea of race, because our idea of blackness and race is simply reactionary. Africans didn’t walk around Africa being black and proud, they walked around proud.

My father‘s a preacher, my mother‘s a teacher, thus I rhyme.

You can’t do anything that’s not political in this time and age.

More people than ever are slowly but surely turning their ears toward poetry.

The MC has to be just that, a master in control. They can show no signs of weakness.

The music aids the message, it’s there to punctuate and abbreviate and shape the silence.

Hip-hop is too young to put a definition on it.

I was always making up rhymes. But I never thought that poetry would become my life.

If we’re gonna progress as a people we are going to realise that, as one of my favourite poets says, the other is a lie. There are no other people. Race is a social construct.