Hip-hop reflects the truth and the problem is that hip-hop exposes a lot of the negative truth that society tries to conceal. It's a platform where we could offer information but it's also an escape.
The only society I like is rough and tough and the tougher the better. There's where you get down to bedrock and meet human people.
When we become a really mature grown-up wise society we will put teachers at the center of the community where they belong. We don't honor them enough we don't pay them enough.
The most important element of a free society where individual rights are held in the highest esteem is the rejection of the initiation of violence.
When a nation goes down or a society perishes one condition may always be found they forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what had brought them along.
We live in a society of victimization where people are much more comfortable being victimized than actually standing up for themselves.
I never leaf through a copy of National Geographic without realizing how lucky we are to live in a society where it is traditional to wear clothes.
After a shooting spree they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.
Where justice is denied where poverty is enforced where ignorance prevails and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress rob and degrade them neither persons nor property will be safe.
In a closed society where everybody's guilty the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves the only final sin is stupidity.
Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees then names the streets after them.
The Viennese wash everything. Where else in the world does the government hire public servants to wash public telephone booths and the glass over traffic lights? Every time I see someone doing these things I smile like a child.
When Whitney Houston died I felt great sadness. My sadness of course was about our collective loss - when you listened to this nightingale sing your body would drop into a chair your head would tilt up a small smile would creep across your face and inside you knew that there was a higher power somewhere: gifted beautiful spiritual.
When trying to remember my share in the glow of the eternal present in the smile of God I return to my childhood too for that is where the most significant discoveries turn up.
Wrinkles will only go where the smiles have been.
It may be far in the future but there's some kind of logical way to get from where we are to where the science fiction is.
Math and science fields are not the only areas where we see the United States lagging behind. Less than 1 percent of American high school students study the critical foreign languages of Arabic Chinese Japanese Korean or Russian combined.
One hardly knows where in the history of science to look for an important movement that had its effective start in so pure and simple an accident as that which led to the building of the great Washington telescope and went on to the discovery of the satellites of Mars.
I really like science because it seems to be that place where you get the big picture everything connects.
I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now the novelist must take a good hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.
But the imposition of morality onto science - where it does not belong - has become rampant in recent years.
Science fiction has a way of letting you talk about where we are in the world and letting you be a bit of a pop philosopher without being didactic.
Except in very narrow cases where there's breakthrough science that needs patent production worrying about competitors is a waste of time. If you can't out iterate someone who is trying to copy you you're toast anyway.
Science fiction let me do both. It let me look into science and stick my nose in everywhere.