Top 362 Ghetto Quotes & Sayings

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.

While 'The Wire' feels startlingly lifelike, it is not, in fact, a naturalistic depiction of ghetto life. That kind of realism better describes an earlier miniseries of Simon's, 'The Corner,' which was based on the book of the same title that he and Ed Burns wrote, set in the same Baltimore ghetto.

Israel is in the grip of a ghetto mentality. We have a powerful army. We have the atomic bomb. But the psychology of what comes out of Israel has the tone of the Warsaw Ghetto.

The ghetto music of my era is hip-hop. And Parliament, and Curtis Mayfield, and Marvin Gaye, that was all the ghetto stuff when I was a baby, and then when I was a teenager it was hip-hop and we were taking all those old '70s sounds and recreating them and putting them into a hip-hop format.

But while so many white Americans are unaware of conditions inside the ghetto, there are very few ghetto dwellers who are unaware of the life outside. The television sets bombard them day by day with the opulence of the larger society.

I went to this arts high school in Greenville, S.C. In speech class, the teacher, a white man, would say, 'You're talking ghetto. Don't talk ghetto.' I'm not only offended, but I'm confused because while there's nothing wrong with people who come from the projects or the ghetto, that's actually not my experience.

But I think people, especially white people, have to come to understand that the language of the ghetto is a language of its own, and as the party - whose members for the most part come from the ghetto - seeks to talk to the people, it must speak the people's language.

I don't like the way people cherish the ghetto, as if it’s some royal palace, or kingdom. I also don't like the way people treat each other in the ghetto. It is really hard to find love, trust, and respect. You don't find too many people that want to do better for themselves in the ghetto because so many people seem to be satisfied with where they're at.

In the Ghetto, I'd been trying to write for years.

I was on Ghetto Idol. We didn't have any of the stuff they have now.

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.

This whole urban rap thing needs to be pulled back some. The ghetto is being glorified, and there's nothing good about the ghetto except getting out of one.

How could you be from the ghetto and be a rat?

A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence.

They don't have to tell me what life is like in a ghetto.

The ghetto is not where you live. The ghetto is inside your mind. And anyone who tells you that you can't get out of the ghettos of your own mind has no idea what they're talking about.

I wonder if heaven got a ghetto?

If I could help every ghetto, I would.

I was the original socially depraved shy ghetto kid.

It's also true, however, that having conquered the regional writer ghetto, I am now intent on conquering the nationalist writer ghetto and moving out into the world more.

Constance L. Rice, co-director of the Los Angeles of the Advancement Project, told the Times that Seltzer might have been influenced by David Simon's fake ghetto series, "The Wire." It figures. Isn't this sexism? Isn't this a double standard? They're hard on this young woman for her fake ghetto book, yet praise these White guys for theirs. So there's a big market in downing Black men.

I was born and raised in the ghetto, on welfare, two minutes from homeless.

I try to use my experience and the fact that I grew up in the ghetto - I tell people you don't have to rob or steal to get out of the ghetto.

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

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 neighborhood, learn science; try to be like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

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.

Richard Price got a million dollar advance on one fake film book based on a paragraph outline and is able to seduce gullible White reviewers who know less about ghetto life than he. The New York Times has devoted more space to Price's tourist, ghetto writing than to any Black writer in history.

Prison is quite literally a ghetto in the most classic sense of the word, a place where the U.S. government now puts not only the dangerous but also the inconvenient—people who are mentally ill, people who are addicts, people who are poor and uneducated and unskilled. Meanwhile the ghetto in the outside world is a prison as well, and a much more difficult one to escape from than this correctional compound. In fact, there is basically a revolving door between our urban and rural ghettos and the formal ghetto of our prison system.

When I was a kid in Boston, it was one of the most anti-Semitic cities in the country. If you were living in the ghetto as I was, the Jewish ghetto part of Roxbury, and you went out alone at night, you might be subject to having people attacking you for being a Christ killer.

'Chopper City in the Ghetto' - a lot of it was B.G.'s real story.

Every mind is a clutter of memories, images, inventions and age-old repetitions. It can be a ghetto, too, if a ghetto is a sealed-off, confined place. Or a sanctuary, where one is free to dream and think whatever one wants. For most of us it's both - and a lot more complicated.

It's important for me to go back into the ghetto, where I'm from. I still get my oxygen from there. I don't live in the ghetto anymore, but every time I go back, I'm still seeing the same things that I lived.

The roots of my music start from the ghetto.

It is impossible to put into words what we have been through. What happened exceeded our boldest dreams. The Germans fled twice from the ghetto... My life's dream has come true. Defense in the ghetto has become a fact. Armed Jewish resistance and revenge are actually happening. I have witnessed the glorious and heroic combat of the Jewish fighters.

I've never wanted to live in a ghetto or write in a ghetto. I want to write about a world that reflects the one most people live in. Gay people are just one aspect of that.

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

There's no such thing as losing touch. You can take me out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of me.

I am from the ghetto.

I came from the heart of the ghetto - there ain't no suburbia in me.

You're either ghetto or you're not.

This was the ghetto: where children grow down instead of up.

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

When you say "Ghetto Fights," that sounds extremely racist.

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.

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.

...for most people in the [Jewish] Ghetto [of Warsaw] nature lived only in memory -- no parks, birds, or greenery existed in the Ghetto -- and they suffered the loss of nature like a phantom-limb pain, an amputation that scrambled the body's rhythms, starved the senses, and made basic ideas about the world impossible for children to fathom.

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

I'm the ghetto Martha Stewart, the black Rachel Ray.

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.

In the ghetto we didn't even know there was such a thing as a private jet.

Drugs are so easy to get in the ghetto. They might not be easy to get in nice areas like Beverly Hills, but in Long Beach and Compton and South Central they're easy to get. They don't drop those drugs off in Beverly Hills. They drop them off in the ghetto. Then they tell us it's wrong to sell them. Well, we didn't bring them here. We just sell them. I was selling, like I sold newspapers.

We were in the heart of the ghetto in Chicago during the Depression, and every block - it was probably the biggest black ghetto in America - every block also is the spawning ground practically for every gangster, black and white, in America too.

It's important for me to go back into the ghetto, where I'm from. I still get my oxygen from there. I don't live in the ghetto but every time I go back, I'm seeing the same things that I lived. That's one of the things I mean when I say, "My feet back onto the ground."

I'm ghetto chic, I'm where the hood and high fashion meet

If the Negro in the ghetto must eternally be fed by the hand that pushes him into the ghetto, he will never become strong enough to get out of the ghetto.

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.

We recorded 'Chopper City in the Ghetto' in a house that we was living in.

People come to L.A. and they expect to see a ghetto like the projects, but that's not the way it's set up. Inglewood, in particular, is the furthest thing from a ghetto. It's a middle-class community, but it's gotten a bad rap over the years... because of 'Grand Canyon' and 'Pulp Fiction' and other films.

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