Top 100 Talib Kweli Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Life is a beautiful struggle...”

— Talib Kweli

2. “Life without knowledge is death in disguise.”

— Talib Kweli

3. “When you shine bright, some won’t enjoy the shadow you cast.”

— Talib Kweli

4. “Skip the religion and politics, head straight to the compassion. Everything else is a distraction.”

— Talib Kweli

5. “You can have your own opinion, but not your own facts.”

— Talib Kweli

6. “A flower that grow in the ghetto know more about survival than the one from fresh meadows.”

— Talib Kweli

7. “I ignored your aura but it grabbed me by the hand, like the moon pulled the tide, and the tide pulled the sand.”

— Talib Kweli

8. “I’m at a loss for words. But even my loss is amplified.”

— Talib Kweli

9. “We get high on all types of drugs when, all you really need is Love.”

— Talib Kweli

10. “Do the math: You never settle for less than the whole if you knew the half.”

— Talib Kweli

11. “Woman are complex creatures.”

— Talib Kweli

12. “God gave us music, so we play with our words.”

— Talib Kweli

13. “With Prisoner of Conscience, the focus was – I’ve worked with Madlib, High Tech, Kanye West, J Dilla. I feel like I’ve worked with some of the greatest of all time. That’s been overlooked. That’s been overshadowed by the weight of the lyrics.”

— Talib Kweli

14. “You gotta eat right, you gotta have healthy habits, you know, and balance out your decadence with a healthy lifestyle during the day.”

— Talib Kweli

15. “Please, this is no disrespect to whoever your man is though. This relationship is strictly musical like D’Angelo.”

— Talib Kweli

16. “They ask me what I’m writing for – I’m writing to show you what we’re fighting for.”

— Talib Kweli

17. “I think hip hop is a dance music that’s rebellious by nature.”

— Talib Kweli

18. “The beautiful thing about hip-hop is it’s like an audio collage. You can take any form of music and do it in a hip-hop way and it’ll be a hip-hop song. That’s the only music you can do that with.”

— Talib Kweli

19. “I don’t care if Rick Ross is 40 years old – he’s a misguided 40-year-old person.”

— Talib Kweli

20. “Consider me the entity within the industry without a history of spitting the epitome of stupidity.”

— Talib Kweli

21. “Jazz is the greatest American art form and our greatest export. We don’t pay attention to the youth of jazz, don’t stoke the fires creatively for the youth coming up. I feel like jazz musicians became too much of purists – with Donald Byrd doing funk jazz in the ’70s.”

— Talib Kweli

22. “What’s more condescending and corny than someone telling you how much more money they have than you and telling you basically, ‘I don’t care about poor people,’ which is a large part of what you hear of corporate hip-hop on the radio.”

— Talib Kweli

23. “Love is blind, you just see bright light.”

— Talib Kweli

24. “There are staples to my show. I have to be conscious about switching things up because I know people who saw me last year will say, ‘He did that last time.’ But if certain things work, they work.”

— Talib Kweli

25. “Hip-hop is a vehicle.”

— Talib Kweli

26. “You make knowledge relevant to life and you make it important for children to learn things that will really relate to things going on in their lives, and not abstract.”

— Talib Kweli

27. “Music is not an exact science so depending on the time and the mode and the energy when we do it that will determine what happens with it.”

— Talib Kweli

28. “You gave birth to a new sound like Donda West.”

— Talib Kweli

29. “People consider Black Star a great album, and I think it’s a classic album. But the fact is, both me and Mos Def have made better albums since Black Star.”

— Talib Kweli

30. “Or is it the mind state that’s ill, creating crime rates to fill the new prisons the build.”

— Talib Kweli

31. “You have to know when to be arrogant. You have to when to be humble. You have to know when to be hard and you have to know when to be soft.”

— Talib Kweli

32. “Truthfully I wanna rhyme like common senseNext best thing I do a record with common sense.”

— Talib Kweli

33. “If you go to a college campus and you do stop and frisk, you’re going to find a lot of drugs there too.”

— Talib Kweli

34. “I feel like your city – with hip hop in particular, because we’re always beating our chest and shouting where we’re from – your city is just as influential as your parents. Even the grimy, hardcore gangster rap from New York – KRS-One and Wu Tang, the stuff acknowledges it.”

— Talib Kweli

35. “We’re in an illusion about what our role is in world politics and foreign affairs, and our policies are killing and destroying and doing a lot of things that we are not aware of.”

— Talib Kweli

36. “Ain’t nobody making music to not be heard and the easiest way to be heard is to be on the radio, but you should never compromise who you are, your values or your morals.”

— Talib Kweli

37. “The materialism, the brashness, the misogyny – everything in hip-hop is amplified. Misogyny is a good example of something that is completely amplified in hip-hop. I do think there is more than enough of a balance, though, for fans who are willing to search it out.”

— Talib Kweli

38. “When I look at the arc of my career, my focus is on lyricism, right? I own that.”

— Talib Kweli

39. “I feel like people mislead themselves when they tell themselves they’re into me because of the lyrics. From my vantage point, people aren’t into me because of the content, because of the lyrics. Because there’s a million of rappers who have great content.”

— Talib Kweli

40. “But there’s so many things in life like women, like children, like God and family that transcends the world of hip-hop.”

— Talib Kweli

41. “There just needs to be a gay rapper who’s better than everybody. That’s when that question will no longer be able to be asked.”

— Talib Kweli

42. “So I just had to step up how I was doing it and the moment that I stepped up and the moment I focused all my energy on that is when things started to happen. So there’s a direct relationship between my inspiration and my output.”

— Talib Kweli

43. “People didn’t really take white rappers seriously until Eminem, because he was better than everybody. Like female emcees, you need to be like Lauryn Hill or Nicki Minaj or killing everything before somebody takes you seriously.”

— Talib Kweli

44. “Being called a conscious rapper is quite a compliment. It’s a great thing to be. But as an artist, my nature is to not be in a box.”

— Talib Kweli

45. “So I think hip-hop is moving and is going to continue to move in the direction of rappers just being honest with themselves, whether you’re talking about Common and Mos Def or Nas and 50 cent.”

— Talib Kweli

46. “I look at the deejay thing as a tier thing. If I’m not going to compete on that level, I’m just going to do it as a hobby.”

— Talib Kweli

47. “My parents are my biggest influences. My parents and my city. Brooklyn, New York, New York City, the community I grew up. I don’t feel like I’m special in that. I feel like that’s everybody.”

— Talib Kweli

48. “I think all those artists are artists who are appreciated because you believe their words and you appreciate their honesty in their music. If you don’t appreciate the honesty in the music, the beat can be fly as hell but you’ll never give an emcee props.”

— Talib Kweli

49. “The way I see it, if people truly love my music, they will support me in some way down the road.”

— Talib Kweli

50. “Unfortunately hip-hop is so competitive that in order for fringe groups to get in, you gotta be better than whoever’s the best. So before Eminem, the idea that there would be a white rapper that anybody would really check for was fantastic or amazing or impossible.”

— Talib Kweli