Top 100 Quotes & Sayings About Ghetto (2024)

'Be faithful to your roots' is the liberal version of 'Stay in your ghetto.' — Mason Cooley

There is one other wall, of course. One we never speak of. One we never see, One which separates memory from madness. In a place no one offers flowers. THE WALL WITHIN. We permit no visitors. Mine looks like any of a million nameless, brick walls - it stands in the tear-down ghetto of my soul; that part of me which reason avoids for fear of dirtying its clothes and from atop which my sorrow and my rage hurl bottles and invectives at the rolled-up windows of my passing youth. Do you know the wall I mean? - Steve Mason, U.S. Army captain (Vietnam), poet Excerpted from the poem "The Wall Within" by Steve Mason, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran considered the unofficial poet laureate of the Vietnam War. "The Wall Within" was read at the 1984 dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, and was entered in its entirety into the Congressional Record. — Kevin Sites

From the ghetto to the mansion, from community leader to prisoner on death row, man wonders if there is a God. And if there is, what is He like? Whatever period of history we study, whatever culture we examine, if we look back in time we see all peoples, primitive or modern, acknowledging some kind of deity. Some people give up the pursuit of God in frustration, calling themselves "atheists" or "agnostics," professing to be irreligious. — Billy Graham

In this era of non-judgmental mush, too many Americans have become incapable of facing the brutal reality of unprovoked hatred, based on envy, resentment and ultimately on a vicious urge to lash out against others for the pain of ones own insignificance. That has been a common thread in things as disparate as ghetto riots, two world wars, and now Islamic terrorism. — Thomas Sowell

In 1913, the noted German actor and director Paul Wegener was making a film in Prague when he heard the legend of Rabbi Loew, who created a golem to protect the inhabitants of the Prague ghetto from persecution. — Kage Baker

The roots of rap are originally ghetto-ised or extremely working class. So when you're an artist who's making something which isn't how its mainstream appearance should be, there's always these strange questions of authenticity and what you have to do to be 'real' as a rapper. — Zadie Smith

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

When hip-hop was born she had no commercial home, and was an invention of beautiful creativity. Born from a beautiful struggle, today she is mostly a 'ratchet' bitch spitting nonsense from her pimp's mansion. — T.F. Hodge

I've always felt that I've made films, period. I wanted to leave the "ghetto." And here I am, I'm out. — Michel Ocelot

You're either ghetto or you're not. — Vince Staples

Although this man spoke pure fluent ghetto, she liked his spirit. She could tell he was attracted to her, and that he was being ever careful with his words. — Brandi L. Bates

Total ghettoization, because they were in charge of public housing, the local council, and they deliberately located people in a ghetto situation in order to ensure that they maintained control. — John Hume

Battery never dies, the ghetto keeps me wise. — Big Pun

That evening it was announced that curfew would be postponed until midnight, so that the families of those 'sent for labour' would have time to bring them blankets, a change of underwear and food for the journey. This 'magnanimity' on the part of the Germans was truly touching, and the Jewish police made much of it in an effort to win our confidence. Not until much later did I learn that the thousand men rounded up in the ghetto had been taken straight to the camp at Treblinka, so that the Germans could test the efficiency of the newly built gas chambers and crematorium furnaces. — Wladyslaw Szpilman

I just feel like I aint never did nothing foul in the game. My ghetto report card has always been straight A's across the board. So I said let me go ahead and name this "My Ghetto Report Card," and I'm touching down on all 4 angles of the game you smell me? I'm touching it from all basis. The album aint banana's, it's coconuts. — E-40

The black masses want not to be shrunk from as though they are plague-ridden. They want not to be walled up in slums, in the ghettos, like animals. They want to live in an open, free society where they can walk with their heads up, like men, and women! Few white people realize that many black people today dislike and avoid spending more time than they must about white people. This 'integration' image, as it is popularly interpreted, has millions of vain, self-exalted white people convinced that black people want to sleep in bed with them - and that's a lie! — Malcolm X

Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink. They create distances for all and shrink them for only a few. A new dirt road through the wilderness brings the city within view, but not within reach, of most Brazilian subsistence farmers. The new expressway expands Chicago, but it sucks those who are well-wheeled away from a downtown that decays into a ghetto. — Ivan Illich

As a people, our monuments never commemorate victories. They commemorate the names of the fallen. We don't need the Arc de Triomphe; we have Masada, Tel-Hai, and the Warsaw Ghetto - where the battle was lost, but the war of Jewish existence was won. — David Elazar

Yo' Momma, I'm a ghetto super star. — Ludacris

Liberals have been driven to the desperate expedient of attributing ... social pathology in today's ghettos to 'a legacy of slavery' even though black children grew up with two parents more often under slavery than today. — Thomas Sowell

Today, a similar debate rages in black communities about the underlying causes of mass incarceration. While some argue that it is attributable primarily to racial bias and discrimination, others maintain that it is due to poor education, unraveling morals, and a lack of thrift and perseverance among the urban poor. Just as former slaves were viewed (even among some African Americans) as unworthy of full citizenship due to their lack of education and good morals, today similar arguments can be heard from black people across the political spectrum who believe that reform efforts should be focused on moral uplift and education for ghetto dwellers, rather than challenging the system of mass incarceration itself. — Michelle Alexander

Reaching out to any fellow ghetto kids is an act he puts in the same category as doing drugs: the initial rush of warmth and euphoria puts you on a path to ruin. — Ron Suskind

I gaze up at the ceiling. Through it. Past Kim and Chip's room on the second floor into the sky, space, heaven, hell. Who says hell is down? It could be up. It could be next door to heaven. Hell could be a subset of heaven, like a ghetto in the middle of a glass city. — Julie Anne Peters

The problem with you middle-class gay guys is, you pass for white. You move to the metropolitan gay centres, and you're more or less closeted--"private", you'd call it--when you step outside the ghetto. You assimilate yourselves, and suddenly you've got property to protect and money invested. I ask you, what impelled the militants of the civil rights movement of the sixties? You know what impelled them? They had nothing to lose. That's how they could brave the police dogs and the fire hoses. Even torture and death. Could you have done that? — Ethan Mordden

A nice thing about children's books, though I'm probably alone in this opinion among other people who write and publish them, is that they did get to be in this unrecognized ghetto for a long time. — Daniel Handler

That's a lot of what the ghetto is, a reflection of poor self esteem — Michele McKnight Baker

Institutionalized:
Ghetto stars pimped so hard for so long
they'll starve to pimp themselves behind psychic bars. — T.F. Hodge

When I was younger, I was one of the few girls in the neighborhood who could break dance. That's kind of my local, ghetto-celebrity claim to fame. — Joy Bryant

The achievements of certain disadvantaged groups (Jews, say) and the continued struggles of others (for instance, blacks) led to pernicious assumptions about the stuff each group was made of. Those who found a way to emerge from the ghetto were said to possess the correct cultural values. — Anonymous

Ghetto Fiction with a twist take a peak it's the sh*t. Not for the timid or the meek don't be scared take a peek... — Cynthia Rubio

Booty is just a ghetto expression, and I'm just a booty star. — Richard Pryor

My style is ghetto chic. I love tacky jewelry, mega heels, high-waisted shorts, catsuits. — Jessie J.

I'm living proof that you can make it out of the ghetto. — Junior Seau

Faster! Faster! Move, you lazy good-for-nothings! the Hungarian police were screaming.
That was when I began to hate them, and my hatred remains our only link today. They were our first oppressors. They were the first faces of hell and death. — Elie Wiesel

In Sweden, I went to an English school, where there was a mishmash of people from all over the world. Some were diplomatic kids with a lot of money, some were ghetto kids who came up from the suburbs, and I grew up in between. There's a community of second generation immigrants, and I became part of that because I had an American father. — Joel Kinnaman

I'm responsible for what i did. I'm not responible for what every black male did. Yes! I call myself a THUG, because i grew up in the ghetto. And im still standing. — Tupac Shakur

Are you kidding me?' Shan asked, slightly drunk, slightly dramatic, and now sitting yoga style on the floor. 'You can't write an honest novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it'll be too obvious. Black writers who do literary fiction in this country, all three of them, not the ten thousand who write those bullsh*t ghetto books with the bright covers, have two choices: they can do precious or they can do pretentious. When you do neither, nobody knows what to do with you. So if you're going to write about race, you have to make sure it's so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn't read between the lines won't even know it's about race ... ' p.335 — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

C.J. had once believed that he understood who he was, what he was about, what he was capable of. But when the moment came to act upon these convictions, he discovered that his knowledge of self was faulty. Had his lack of killer instinct been a momentary lapse, first time jitters? Or was there more to it than that? If not the fearless, remorseless man he supposed himself to be, then just who was he? — Roy L. Pickering Jr.

Nobody went out to pasture, and a lot of people are doing their best work. Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, and Sting are at the top of their game. I mean, Tony Bennett is the coolest guy I ever met! We have to figure out how to break out of this age ghetto. — Bonnie Raitt

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

You can hear the seven sins
Blowin' through the ghetto wind ... — Rakim

You see, I was born in the slums, that was before the ghetto. The ghetto was kind of refined; the slums was right there on the ground. — Della Reese

Parents and schoolteachers counsel black children that, if they ever hope to escape this system and avoid prison time, they must be on their best behavior, raise their arms and spread their legs for the police without complaint, stay in failing schools, pull up their pants, and refuse all forms of illegal work and moneymaking activity, even if jobs in the legal economy are impossible to find. Girls are told not to have children until they are married to a "good" black man who can help provide for a family with a legal job. They are told to wait and wait for Mr. Right even if that means, in a jobless ghetto, never having children at all. — Michelle Alexander

Hanna Krall's book Shielding the Flame drew on the experience of Dr. Marek Edelman, who before he died in 2009 was the sole survivor of the five-person command that led the April 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. — Chris Hedges

When you become an animal, a vulture, in the ghetto, as I had become, you enter a world of animals and vultures. It becomes truly the survival of only the fittest. — Malcolm X

We have created our own aesthetic!"
"You mean our own Ghetto. — Larry Kramer

I want to take Negroes out of the ghetto and put them in good neighborhoods in good houses. — Malcolm X

No segment of the population has lost more by the agendas of the liberal constituencies of the Democratic Party than the black population. The teachers' unions, environmental fanatics and the ACLU are just some of the groups to whose interests blacks have been sacrificed wholesale. Lousy education and high crime rates in the ghettos, and unaffordable housing elsewhere with building restrictions, are devastating prices to pay for liberalism. — Thomas Sowell

Later, when they sat down and went over the figures closely, they found an interesting pattern. Adamowski had received fifty-one percent of the votes, cast by white persons. But the enormous black vote had given Daley his victory. The people who were trapped in the ghetto slums and the nightmarish public housing projects, the people who had the worst school system and were most often degraded by the Police Department, the people who received the fewest campaign promises and who were ignored as part of the campaign trail, had given him his third term. They had done it quietly, asking for nothing in return. Exactly what they got. — Mike Royko

There was our house in New Orleans. Two blocks in front of us were these beautiful mansions and two blocks behind us were the ghetto, projects, and that's where I had to go to school, but I would always pattern my life looking forward. It was almost literal. — Tyler Perry

Ghetto living is more than just a feeling of confinement; it is a sense of suffocation too. — Susan Nathan

Ghetto-dwellers are the great fantasists. There was an extraordinary vibrancy there, an imaginative life. When you are that poor, all you've got left is your belief in the imagination. — Ben Okri

Born through hard times, Ghetto child of mine. I wonder if you have to suffer for your father's crimes. — Tupac Shakur

It is known all over the world that there are no secrets in the ghetto and as long as you keep those secrets, you may keep your life. — Felix Alexander

I just thought everybody lived around abandoned buildings and crack-heads, ... I lived in the ghetto until I was like 19. I came to Los Angeles, stayed at hotels and stuff. When I got back and I saw what my neighborhood looked like, I started getting scared. — Chris Rock

I believe in heaven more than hell, lessons more than jail.
In the ghetto, let love prevail with a story to tell.
My eyes see the glory, and well,
The world waiting for me to yell, "I Have A Dream!" — Common

Part of the French political class is realising that there is are large number of Muslim people coming from the ghettos who want to make themselves heard, politically, especially about foreign policy issues. Its electoral weight can bring back to the forefront the Palestinian issue. — Tariq Ramadan

He refuses to sell his paintings and writes "NOT FOR SALE" on some of them. He is furious because people are writing about his ghetto childhood and call him a "graffiti artist" and "primitive." "They don't invent a childhood for white artists," he says. — Jennifer Clement

In the new American ghetto, the nightmare engine is bubble economics, a kind of high-tech casino scam that kills neighborhoods just like dope does, only the product is credit, not crack or heroin. It concentrates the money of the population in just a few hands with brutal efficiency, just like narco-business, and just as in narco-business the product itself, debt, steadily demoralizes the customer to the point where he's unable to prevent himself from being continually dominated. — Matt Taibbi

Ghetto is not the People but their state of mind. — Joan Ambu

'm constantly depressed by the Mexican gang members I meet in East L.A. who essentially live their lives inside five or six blocks. They are caught in some tiny ghetto of the mind that limits them to these five blocks because, they say, "I'm Mexican. I live here." And I say, "What do you mean you live here - five blocks? Your granny, your abualita, walked two thousand miles to get here. She violated borders, moved from one language to another, moved from a sixteenth-century village to a twenty-first-century city, and you live within five blocks?" — Richard Rodriguez

Ghetto humor is the social twin of fantasy; together they sustain the powerless, who accomplish miracles through illusion. — Sheila Ballantyne

The Israeli mentality was totally different to mine. They just didn't understand people like me. They couldn't understand why I had been in a ghetto. We were totally different. — Edgar Hilsenrath

For years I've been interested in a fundamental question concerning what I call the psychology of evil: Why is it that good people do evil deeds? I've been interested in that question since I was a little kid. Growing up in the ghetto in the South Bronx, I had lots of friends who I thought were good kids, but for one reason or another they ended up in serious trouble. They went to jail, they took drugs, or they did terrible things to other people. My whole upbringing was focused on trying to understand what could have made them go wrong. — Philip Zimbardo

Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto. — Ursula K. Le Guin

We too are so dazzled by power and money as to forget our essential fragility, forget that all of us our in the ghetto, that the ghetto is fenced in, that beyond the fence stands the lords of death, and not far away the train is waiting. — Primo Levi

My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of 'Gone With the Wind', and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It's actually one of the things that you live and die for. — Neil Gaiman

When you've been on a ghetto diet your entire life, you're just happy to get a large soda instead of a medium. — Chris Rock

There would be no Rock and Roll without Ike Turner, James Brown, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint, etc. Fake ghetto books and fake ghetto music. Elvis Presley, whom they idol, is merely a karaoke makeover of James Brown and Chuck Berry. — Ishmael Reed

He looks at me and then, reverting to the voice he'd used with Kendra, says, 'If homegirls wanna see me as ghetto trash'
he stops and switches to his lispy, sassy voice
'or big-ass queer'
now he switches to his deepest Shakespeare voice
'I shall not take it upon myself to disabuse them. — Gayle Forman

We insist that this stuff we call science fiction is not SCI-FI. For some in the ghetto of Genre this is axiomatic, a secret truth known only to the genre kids, that there is proper science fiction and then there's that SCI-FI sh*t. — Hal Duncan

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. — Will.i.am

For most Black people there is still poverty and desperation. The Ghettos still exist, and the proportion of Blacks in prison is still much greater than Whites. Today, there is less overt racism, but the economic injustices create an "institutional racism" which exists even while more Blacks are in high places, such as Condoleeza Rice in Bush's Administration and Obama running for President. — Howard Zinn

Statistically speaking, tracking tended to diminish learning and boost inequality wherever it was tried. In general, the younger tracking happened, the worse the entire country did on PISA. There seemed to be some kind of ghetto effect: once kids were labeled and segregated into the lower track, their learning slowed down. — Amanda Ripley

This, then, is the global significance of Chungking Mansions. It is a building of the periphery within a city of the core, a city located between the developing world's manufacturing hub and its poorest nether regions. It is a ghetto of middle-class striving within a city of wealthier middle-class striving, viewing its denizens with fear and scorn yet letting business as usual be the law of the day. Chungking — Gordon Mathews

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. — Saul Williams

I raise my stein to the builder who can remove ghettos without removing people as I hail the chef who can make omelets without breaking eggs. — Robert Moses

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. — Kelly Price

In my experience I haven't met too many uptight black people. I'm sure they're out there. Like I'm some big authority and I've lived in the inner city and ghetto. — Paul Reubens

I'm not really sure what I'd like to see people doing more of online, but what I'd like to see less of is the warning signs that not ratifying net neutrality is gonna cause two separate nets: one that the big dogs can afford to be on and the other a ghetto internet that no one goes on. Think FM vs AM radio, or cable vs broadcast TV. — Drew Curtis

The sea of excited people, the flood of colored lights, and the unending stream of cars were proof that the days of the Holocaust were now part of the history books. I awakened from my horrible memories and almost agreed with the opinion voiced by many that the ghetto was a dead issue and the whole period surrounding it too far-fetched, too cruelly-sad*stic, to be believable today, assuming it really existed.... The reign of man-eating furnaces is hard for a reasonable mind to grasp, even that of someone who was a victim himself. — Joseph Bau

If you can justify killing to eat meat, you can justify the conditions of the ghetto. I cannot justify either one. — Dick Gregory

Mr. Beaconsfield is the Year Eleven drama teacher. He's one of those teachers who likes being "down with the kids" - all gelled hair and "call me Jeff."He's also the reason our version of Romeo and Juliet is set in a Brooklyn ghetto and Juliet is leaning out of a trailer rather than a balcony. — Zoe Sugg

The roots of my music start from the ghetto. — Ziggy Marley

As hard as it is, as ghetto as it is, hip-hop is pop music. It's the sound of music getting out of the ghetto, while rock is looking for a ghetto. — Bono

What motivates someone who's become wealthy to go out and work in the ghetto with those who are poor? What motivates one who has perfect health to go and work with the sick? If you understand - then you understand the root and cause of all existence. — Frederick Lenz

Before annihilation comes an exile from Nature, and then only through wonder and transcendence, the Ghetto rabbi taught, may one combat the psychic disintegration of everyday life. — Diane Ackerman

Punk can be a mental ghetto. People get into it and make all these rules and pretty soon they're worse than born again Christians and have stupid three hour conversation about things like, which band is a sellout and is straight edge cool or un-cool and it's just completely idiotic. So punk has taught me the aesthetic of the outsider, which is great, but it's also taught me not to get involved in petty little cults. — Jesse Michaels

him swinging the baton and knocking out my side teeth and cracking my temple so that I can never hear good out of that ear again and saying let that be a lesson to never take you dutty, stinking, ghetto self uptown again. And I see them and I wait. But — Marlon James

You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest. — Junot Diaz

At Murry Bergtraum [High School] if you were really funny you sat at this table at with all of the funniest dudes, the toughest, the coolest - everybody sat at that table. It was like the ghetto Algonquin Round Table. [Comedy] was my entry, my membership card. — John Leguizamo

I don't hide anything about my life, I talk about everything. I talk about it - all kinds of things. I've done songs about bad experiences, a couple about growing up in the ghetto and being abused, sexually. Being raped. And I talk about it. — Lady Saw

I have always disliked the idea of an arts ghetto in which poetry is kept on a life-support system. — Tony Harrison

There'd never been a clothing line made by a young woman like me: a multiethnic woman who has one foot in Gucci and one foot in the ghetto. — Kimora Lee Simmons

I am a product of a rat and roach infested black ghetto. It is easy for me to rationalize my dealings as a numbers man. I'll defend men today who are involved in it. — Don King

If I didn't mould my reality then I'd still be in the ghetto where people like me are supposed to stay. You have to dream your way out of the nightmare. — Will.i.am

Richard Price, who has made a fortune writing fake ghetto books, says he takes a cab into the ghetto, transcribes Black speech for a brief time and returns home. His fake ghetto books have bought him a townhouse in Gramercy Park and home on Staten Island. — Ishmael Reed

A democracy survives when its citizens have access to trustworthy and impartial sources of information, when it can discern lies from truth. Take this away and a democracy dies. The fusion of news and entertainment, the rise of a class of celebrity journalists on television who define reporting by their access to the famous and the powerful, the retreat by many readers into the ideological ghettos of the Internet and the ruthless drive by corporations to destroy the traditional news business are leaving us deaf, dumb and blind. — Chris Hedges

We become like dead branches and last year's leaves and what the hell good are we for ourselves and the world in a mental ghetto. — Chaim Potok

Nobody ever got their ass out of the ghetto by letting someone else step ahead of them in line. And no-one ever got rich and famous by laying back and hoping someone would notice who they are and what they do. — Snoop Dogg