142 Inspiring Quotes by Ice Cube

Don't worry about being a star, worry about doing good work, and all that will come to you.

I've done movies for certain reasons; I did 'Anaconda' because the black man lives. Simple. The black man isn't dead in the first three pages, like Jurassic Park. It's like, 'The black man kills the snake with a Latino girl? Damn! I got to do this.'

I love music. It's freedom, a way to deal with pent-up frustration.

I have a really beautiful life right now, so there is no reason to be hostile. I'm a husband, a father and a man who tries to do the right thing in life and in my work.

You don't wanna mess up what you've done. It's like Jordan coming back: You're scared to mess up the legacy.

I used to love to draw. I didn't want to go to art class because I felt that would be too corny when I was young, but architectural drafting was the cool thing to do because there was more precision. It taught me a lot about building and structures and doorways and frames and windowsills.

Ice Cube is the piece of me that I give away to the public.

What I learned from architectural drafting is that everything has to have a plan to work. You just can't wing it. I can't get all the materials I need for a house and just start building. Whether it's a career, family, life -- you have to plan it out.

I think the worst thing you can do about a situation is nothing.

But with rap music -- not just N.W.A. -- but rap music in general, seeing these artists wearing these team logos all the time started bringing a synergy and energy about having to rep your city, your team, everywhere and all the time.

Gangsta to us didn't have anything to do with Al Capone and stuff like that. It's just about living your life the way you want to live it. And you're not going to let nothing stop you.

I think I'm unique to the game 'cause of my versatility.

There's a lot of potential that goes unused in places like South Central L.A., a lot of brilliant, smart people who just don't have that chance to show it.

When I did 'Boyz N The Hood,' I never thought how we grew up in South Central was interesting enough for a movie.

The thing is with hip-hop, it has its waves and the waves crash against the beach and the new waves come in. So to stay relevant you have to roll with that.

I definitely support cop acting more than cops, but all of them ain't bad, just some of them.

Rap is just somebody getting something off his chest. That's all it is.

Even though I have a nice house, nice family, the rest of my generation is still in South Central L.A. My cousins, my brothers, my sisters, they don't wanna move out. They don't want to and they don't have the means to sustain it. That's where my heart is and that's what I think about all the time.

There's never really been a real hood Christmas movie.

I'm trying to cut down a little on eating, on sodium, keep my blood pressure down, which is tough. Because I love food! I do, but it's unfair how everything that's bad for you tastes so good, and all the good stuff, veggies and green things, doesn't match up.

The silver and black may have another home, but the Raiders will always belong to the people of Los Angeles.

Doing it your own way, not having to go exactly by the book to be successful.

The moral is that a career can be gone in an instant. And all you have in this world are the people you love.

Snoop Dog is the Phil Jackson of youth football coaches. He ain't going to accept nothing but a winner.

South Central is just who I am.

Sports without music, it's nothing but a game. Music adds the emotion.

I think reading is important in any form. I think a person who's trying to learn to like reading should start off reading about a topic they are interested in, or a person they are interested in.

I was ready to get out of the box and play something a little different than what everybody has seen.

The best thing I've done with my money is buy a house for my family. You wake up to a house you love and you feel like somebody.

Young people are dying for no reason all over the world that don't know why. It's ugly, everywhere.

Don't get a movie confused with real life. I'm a well-rounded human being like everyone else.

We're in this entertainment business really to give the audience what they want.

It's funny how people who ain't never been down there can think that America is so fair and that we should be alright. It's funny that the people who have their foot on our neck are telling us, 'Get up. What's wrong with you?'

There's a lot of talent in South Central L.A., in Compton and Long Beach and Watts, and the city north of Pico pretty much sits back and waits for that talent to emerge and then steps in.

I been all around the world and I haven't found a city that I'd rather be from or rather come back to than Los Angeles.

Sometimes when you're relegated to your neighborhood, you forget that there's more important things than your neighborhood going on out in the world.

Music has done a lot to enhance the emotions of sports. It's played in arenas. Whenever there is footage cut together they're always using music. And it goes together, you know.

Music is where I have the most creative freedom, but I love producing. To me, that's kind of where all the action is. You get a chance to have your hands in every aspect of a film. From picking a director, sometimes picking a writer, to the actors, the wardrobe, set design, editing, music, and marketing.

Anything that got to do with a pig, I ain't eatin'.

I never was in the Nation of Islam... I mean, what I call myself is a natural Muslim, 'cause it's just me and God.

When people see the Cubevision logo, they should know it's something good, something worth checking out.

Twerking has to end. Not for the ones that look good doing it, but for all the ones that you feel, 'You don't have enough to twerk back there. Your twerkin' look like jerkin'.

Quincy Jones' autobiography 'Q' is very good. Because he's a master at music, he's one of our greatest composers, and its good for him to have a book and tell the good ole days when he was with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan and Ray Charles.

Some people have a taboo about doing advertising in the States. You know, where they kind of make their bread and butter. But to me, that's crazy.

'Boyz-n-the-Hood' was actually supposed to be written for Eazy's group. He had a group out in New York called Home Boys Only, called HBO. One of them looked like LL Cool J. Eazy wanted to write a song for them, a street song, like what we were doing on the mix tapes. So when I wrote it, it was too West Coast for them.

I'm not actually from Compton -- I'm from South Central Los Angeles, and my father still lives in the same house I grew up in, so I'm there all the time.

I believe every pencil has to be sharpened every now and then to stay sharp, or you dull out. So my records, I chose to speak on what black people do, what white people do, what women do, what men do.

A bird in the hand is worth more than a Bush.

Everybody who comes from the gangster life -- they want what that man in the suburbs wants. Nice family. Nice house. Nice cars. Bills paid. Kids in school. Food on the table. Nothing more.

Nobody I know got killed in South Central LA. Today was a good day.

I'm a B-boy at heart. I still like rhyming. It's just the radio game is like Chinese arithmetic. It's hard to know what nuts to crack. But I still love music, been dropping music. Never stopped, really.

I'm always open, and will criticize myself, too. And I just think being that honest with everybody puts you in a different space than somebody who's just shooting venom at a certain group or a certain amount of individuals.

I'm interested in how things are put together, and that's more interesting to me than just regular shows, even though I like The Walking Dead.

I'm the most successful person in my generation of family members, and that sucks.

Brothers keep asking Ice Cube, 'Yo, when will you bust?'
They surround me and make a big fuss.

It's easier for me to get comedies made because of my track record. Everybody needs to find their niche. I love dramas, but I understand that I am still just a young man in moviemaking. I know there will be some time to get back to that.

I think director Malcolm Lee is a real master at being able to make you laugh while bringing serious subject-matter, so the movie doesn't hinge on silliness, but on real life.

You pay to have a good time, you don't always want to pay to be schooled or sad or reminded how bad you got it. To me a movie theater ain't always the place for that.

I like Obama, but I understand that his hands are tied, the way Congress is reacting. It's just partisan politics everywhere, and don't know how we going to get things done in the future without compromising a little bit.

People are still tied to their hoods, and it's usually not the artist, it's usually the friends and instigators who get it popping.

It never gets old. Working with somebody like Kevin Hart is rejuvenating in a lot of ways. He's such a pro. He's so good.

America eats its youth like reptiles...Educat e yourself before they dumb you down.

When my nine goes buck, it will bust your head like a watermelon dropping 12 stories up.

The movie industry is one big collaboration. Music gives me that freedom to create things straight from my heart and my mind.

I think hip-hop has changed. When I first came out, hip-hop was more of a kind of way to learn about new places, new things. What are kids doing on the East coast, what are kids doing here. Then it left that and is like a party mode. I think it's going back to people wanting to get messages and wanting to learn things from the music.

You really have to challenge yourself to come out of those parameters that they put you in, even if that's your job.

I would love to meet Bob Marley. I mean, he's passed, but that's somebody that I would've loved to meet.

Everybody in the world has to compromise. I don't know one person that gets everything they want, so the politicians are going to have to figure that out and stop pointing out, "He shook hands with a Democrat in 1989. He ate with a Republican last week." It's petty high school, even junior high stuff going on. It's junior high politics going on, so it's a shame.

Money comes and goes, but your inner feelings, your gut feelings, your manhood, your womanhood, whatever, that stays with you. That don't go anywhere. So you either proud of who you are and how you handle situations or you not. If you handle a situation wrong, you, it will haunt you.

When you're spending your money for a nice outing, you want to go have a good time. And I always thought comedies, laughing, was something that was made for entertainment on that level. And records and maybe TV and stuff like that is really made to be heavy.

I'm ready to run a studio. I'm ready to green light movies, and be in it to win it, you know? It's close. It'll happen.

I'm a menace to society,
But girls in biker shorts are so fly to me.
After the date, I'mma want to do the wild thing...
You're talkin' lobster? I'm thinkin' Burger King.

I hope everything works in our favor. The show is cool. It's family fare. We ain't aiming at the cheap seats. Instead, we're making something with a broad appeal that people of any color or creed and from all walks of life can enjoy and maybe learn something from.

I love Godzilla, but my favorite was on this TV Show, Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot. I used to love the idea of having a giant robot under my control. That was like a dream come true for a kid.

I think rap music is the sole reason for a lot of black acceptance in pop culture; because the music is very popular, it gets our image out in other ways than in movies.

Should I peel a cap or should I let him survive?

I get freedom out of hip-hop. I get to be a true artist without any shackles or harnesses.

You don't have to be super clean to be a super star.

You always want your kids to step up at the moment of truth.

Run DMC brought us out of that underground-only feel. They brought rap above ground and made it respectable as an art form to mainstream music.

I think my fans respect me for bein' as truthful and honest as you can be and still be Rap music and not be opinion music. It's still Rap, its still style, flavor, flair, and people just kind of like how I present myself and the things that I do.

You wanna be remembered for making an impact and changing things. I guess for the good or for the bad, it don't matter. But I guess you just wanna be remembered when it's all said and done.

I think you have to find how the machine can work for you. That's what I mean by "attaching yourself to the machine," 'cause the machine is going to be there, and you can rage against the machine, which is cool, but there's ways that you can benefit off the machine if you're savvy enough and you're sharp enough, smart enough. We all got to live and eat.

I think when hip hop first started, people were open to it, and groups like Public Enemy and there was groups like Poor Righteous Teachers and all these people who were spitting a lot of knowledge, a lot of history, questioning a lot of societal barriers was starting to be super popular.

Everybody thinks the grass is greener on the other side. If you talk to most artists, they think they can play something, you know, "If I had stayed playing football in high school, if I had been doing basketball..." Everybody's got their fantasies and thinks the grass is greener. It's not. It's not.

Get a grip, Oreo, and be true to the game.

Make a sitcom was really the idea of Executive Producer Joe Roth who owned the property over at Revolution Studios and said he was thinking about taking it to TV. And after he said that he already had writer director Ali Leroi on board, and that he was going after Terry Crews, to me it was a no-brainer. I said, "Let's put this together!

For my birthday, buy me a politician!

Money is the root of all evil. Yeah, money is the root. It's not racism and "this-ism" and "that-ism"; it's our thirst and hunger for money. And that's where all the bodies are buried.

When you have a good movie, it's hard to categorize it. It's everything. It makes you laugh, makes you cry and makes you think.

I'm always the "less is more" guy when it comes to a scene. So I'ma be the one who will keep it grounded. Even if I let it go off and go crazy, I'm still the voice of keeping things grounded in reality.

I figured, when I make a movie, especially earlier in my career, one thing I was going to make sure was that the movie doesn't cost a lot and that it has potential to make a lot of money. That's how you get respect in Hollywood.

I'm not trying to turn into Eddie Murphy, and just do kids movies the rest of my career. I'm going to still do a wide variety of movies, as well as do hardcore rap.

Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall with a joint, drinking some eight-ball.

No matter what part of the country you come from, you can always come together to make groundbreaking hip-hop.

I don't cook gumbo, but I just know it's a lot of good ingredients in it. And, with a movie, you got to have all those ingredients.

I know my flavor's going to work because I just know there's not a lot of guys like me around. So you got to figure out what's that about you.

Keep doin' what you're doin', fall in love with what you're creating, and everything else will fall into place.

There's rumors in the Twittersphere. If I find out that any of my officer is giving out drug and alcohol I send their ass to prison with a snorkel duct-taped to their mouth and me s***ing down that Snorkel.

When you go to a movie, you don't care for one Oscar, really. Do you care if a guy got a Oscar on the shelf or is it a good movie? And, you don't care how much the movie made.

You can do anything in the world if you say "Hey man, don't blame me, the devil made me do it. It's an easy way to escape responsibility.

We'll burn your store right down to a crisp.

I like to deal with things I heard about, ... People are always getting their house broken into around the holidays. That's when the crime rate goes up.

The hardest period for a writer is the period in-between writing. That's when you can go crazy if you don't allow the creative juices to flow.

You can measure films on box office success, or people lovin' the movie whenever they see it. That's what I measure my movies on. How much people love these movies after they get a chance to see them, no matter how they get a chance to see them.

I still want to put together bigger and better programs to work with the community. I still think I could do better on that end.

I was trying to be the best rapper in the world. I wasn't thinking about acting.

We should love the fact that we're not just getting one point of view. That we have this diversity in entertainment, and people are not scared to be themselves, and people are not scared to make people uncomfortable, and that's all part of it. That's all part of being free.

There's things people say in the barbershop they won't even say in their own living room, because it's just one of those zones where nobody's going to judge you too much about your dumb opinion.

The creative process of making a movie really turned me on. I'd started getting behind the scenes with a camcorder and VHS tape when making music videos.

You learn that Hollywood has its own rules, sometimes. And it's tricky, and sometimes you can't see what's coming around the corner.

I'm always happy. I've just got a mean face.

I wanted to go in a different direction, artistically. But having somebody like TerryCrews in it was your ace in the hole. That makes it very strong, so I definitely had to jump in with both feet.

I've always gotten good grades, you know, with my teachers and my English teachers, 'cause I was able to -- they'd say, "What did you do for the summer?" I'm able to explain it to them in a written form. And my teachers always patted me on the back for that, being able to take what's in my mind and put it on paper.

My wife keeps me sharp. You know, she ain't going to let me get comfortable with this "Ice Cube" stuff.

My thing is, I know kids cuss, they do their thing, but I tell my kids, 'Don't do it in earshot of any adults, or you're in trouble.'

Cool people still have a hard time showing what they got in Hollywood.

I like to tell the streets what the political climate is, and I like to tell any politicians that's listening what the streets think. And sometimes people get nicked up and bruised up, but I usually have a lot of good medicine for that.

If you really think back to the culture or just black America before rap music took off, New York could have been Paris.

You want the industry to finally admit that you're good. But I'm still good without their admission.

My worst ever car was a green Datsun B210, back when they called it 'Datsun' -- now it's 'Nissan.' Very unsexy, unattractive. Girls hated the car. I was embarrassed to even be in it but it was my transportation.

I'm not the type of actor who is trying to do a whole bunch of different shit, you know what I mean?

While I had done the movies through Revolution Studios, we own the sitcom. It was a situation where, once the team was assembled, I knew we could create something really, really good.

The biggest change in the government's behavior has been because of TV and its ability to show to the world what has happened in this community... that's the biggest change. But without TV... the separation between the government and the people would be much worse than it is.

I'm a B-boy at heart. I still like rhyming. It's just the radio game is like Chinese arithmetic. It's hard to know what nuts to crack. But I still love music, been dropping music. Never stopped really.

Most actors have to sit by the phone and wait for somebody to call them up to audition and stuff. I don't think I can exist in Hollywood just on that. I think I need to be proactive and making sure that things I really want to do are being developed to the point where somebody wants to make them?

I believe our society has fell into a pyramid system where there's people relegated to the bottom of that pyramid and there's people that feel like they're entitled to the top of that pyramid.

Are We There Yet?" was the perfect title, because it's such a common saying. And having made the movie with the same name kinda locks it all in.

If you born in the mud, you gonna be dirty, and people don't understand that.

The police don't look at you as long when they drive past. Sometimes they don't look at you at all. In South Central, you've got them looking and lurking. I think it's basic harassment. It's part of their tactics to have everybody nervous of them. In the valley, at least I don't feel it the same way.

I won't do anything for money. I won't compromise my manhood.

Boycott Oscar is like crying about not having enough icing on your cake. It's just ridiculous.

My advice for anyone who wants to follow in my footsteps: create your own path, hone your talent, be ready to show your talent, and don't doubt yourself.

You the devil in drag. You can burn your cross, Well, I'll burn your flag.

As a husband, I'm a true partner. I don't believe one person should have dominance over another.

I grew up in the seventies and disco was big. That influenced me the most.

Go down to the corner store and beat the Jap up, clean all the crap up.

I did 'Are We There Yet?' because I wanted to do a movie for my fans' kids. Black kids don't really see movies on this budget for them, starring them. And there's so many white kids that love that movie.

People associate clothes with actual behavior, and it's kind of crazy. If you get shot in some Levi's you don't go after Levi's. It's not the clothes. It's always the people.

Do the math, do the math baby it's the curse of money, once you got it, fool you got it.