Juxtaposed Def Quotes

I'm blacked than midnight on Broadway and Myrtle ~ Mos Def

And from the moment that I saw you, I knew you was trouble,
But I disregarded detour signs,
And did not stop til you was mine.
I guess God was like, 'Aight, fine.'
Careful what you wish for, cause you just might get it in heaps.
Try to give it back, He be like, 'Nah, that's yours to keep.' ~ Mos Def

You want to know how to rhyme, then learn how to add. It's mathematics. ~ Mos Def

Hip-hop is a beautiful culture. It's inspirational, because it's a culture of survivors. You can create beauty out of nothingness. ~ Mos Def

I like playing the social convention. If you're in a period drama, there's always something dancing underneath the surface as a human - but then you always have to conform to the social conventions around you, and those two things get to be juxtaposed against each other. You're being human, but you're trapped within the social convention of the time. ~ Jenna Coleman

Bob Marley performed the 'One Love Peace' concert in Jamaica with the two different warring political sides. There's always been that in black music and culture in general. It's no surprise because black music is such a reflection of what's going on in black life. It's not unusual for hip-hop. ~ Mos Def

We blasted holes in the night until she bled sunshine ~ Mos Def

I don't wanna be def. Death. Dead. This Burger Twin nappykin just got served as my will, BEOTCH! The fries here suck, by the way. If I die, don't feed my son your shitty fries. Don't give my son to the creepy child molester king you put in your commercials either. What the fuck is wrong with that guy? He's got a normal body and a plastic face that is always smiley. It's not right, man. It's just not right. My ears feel funny. ~ Tara Sivec

Thoughts of Narian, the strong, brave, tender young man with whom I had fallen in love, juxtaposed against the dark entity I envisioned taking over my homeland, would have shredded my sanity. ~ Cayla Kluver

I've always loved music and I love the language, which is a huge reason why I'm part of theater. ~ Mos Def

What made me want to become a recording artist; I was the first artist that was repeatedly asked by a label to record with them. That label was Def Jam Records. ~ Chuck D

You've got to validate every day. There are those who just put a stamp on it and say, "This is gonna be a good day and I'm not gonna let anything else make it a bad day." ~ Mos Def

The dimensions of video game characters, even when they're scanned from real people, are beefed up with exaggerated proportions in games like Def Jam: Fight for NY to give them more pop. ~ Cliff Bleszinski

I am not trying to say that a passport photo of himself can cure a gloomy man of a gloom for which there is no ground; for true gloom is by nature groundless; such gloom, ours at least, can be traced to no identifiable cause, and with its almost riotous gratuitousness this gloom of ours attained a pitch of intensity that would yield to nothing. If there was any way of making friends with our gloom, it was through the photos, because in these serial snapshots we found an image of ourselves which, though not exactly clear, was - and that was the essential - passive and neutralized. They gave us a kind of freedom in our dealings with ourselves; we could drink beer, torture our blood sausages, make merry and play. We bent and folded the pictures, and cut them up with little scissors we carried about with us for this precise purpose. We juxtaposed old and new pictures, made ourselves one-eyed or three-eyed, put noses on our ears, made our exposed right ears into organs of speech or silence, combined chins and foreheads. And it was not only each with his own likeness that we made these montages; Klepp borrowed features from me and I from him: thus we succeeded in making new, and we hoped, happier creatures. ~ Gunter Grass

The quality of life depends upon the ability of society to teach it's members how to live in harmony with their environment-def ined first as family, then the community, then the world and its resources. ~ Ellen Swallow Richards

This thing called rhymin' is no different than coal minin';
We both on assignment to unearth the diamond. ~ Mos Def

Who dreamt
and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed,
and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together
jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame ~ Allen Ginsberg

I began to fear that Mos Def was being treated as a product, not a person, so I've been going by Yasiin since '99. At first it was just for friends and family, but now I'm declaring it openly. ~ Mos Def

I feel like I was the only person who was capable of making this type of music in this type of way. I don't rap like nobody, I don't try to sound like nobody. ~ Mos Def

The only rule was that the stuff had to be funny and pretty short. To me, the quintessential Army Man joke was one of John Swartzwelder's: 'They can kill the Kennedys. Why can't they make a cup of coffee that tastes good?' It's a horrifying idea juxtaposed with something really banal-and yet there's a kind of logic to it. It's illuminating because it's kind of how Americans see things: Life's a big jumble, but somehow it leads to something I can consume. I love that. ~ George Meyer

You can positively affect and change a social circumstance with art, and it's vital that a change happens now. ~ Mos Def

Hip-hop is rock & roll. What the hell is Wu-Tang but Motorhead? ~ Mos Def

Breathe in ... inhale vapors from bright stars that shine,
Breathe out ... weed smoke retrace the skyline. ~ Mos Def

Originally the structure was ... a modern narrator who would appear intermittently and talk about his memories of his grandmother, which would then be juxtaposed against scenes from the past. But the stories from the past were always more interesting that the things in the present. I find this almost endemic to modern plays that veer between past and present ... So as we've gone on developing GOLDEN CHILD, the scenes from the past have become more dominant, and all that remains of the present are these two little bookends that frame the action. ~ David Henry Hwang

I get reminded a lot of the time that my life is a little bit different, but I'm just trying to keep it as regular as possible because I like it that way. ~ Mos Def

I can scare the pants off the holiest ghost. ~ Def Leppard

I signed to Def Jam and within two months, I heard that Ja Rule was looking for someone to do a song with. ~ Christina Milian

These peoples probably feared death even more than we do. Our civilisation presents us with a marvellous mental machinery designed to help us forget, for most of our lives, that one day we too will die. In time we manage to push death out of our consciousness, just as we have done with the existence of God. That's what civilisation does. But for these archaic peoples nothing was more immediately apparent than death and the dead, I mean actual dead people, whose mysterious para-existence, fate, and vengeful fury constantly preoccupied them. They had a tremendous horror of death and the dead. But then of course in their minds everything was more ambiguous than it is for us. Opposites sat much closer. The fear of death and the desire for death were intimately juxtaposed in their minds, and the fear was often a form of desire, the desire a form of fear. ~ Antal Szerb

I never had any ambitions of being a movie star or anything like that, but you know, this is nice. ~ Mos Def

Guy: What has nine arms and sucks?
Me: What?
Guy: Def Leppard. ~ Jason Myers

Not every bad break is negative in the long term; not every problem is a bona fide injustice; and not every injustice is major when juxtaposed against the millions of injustices that occur daily throughout the world. ~ Robert Ringer

Hip-Hop went from selling crack to smoking it ~ Mos Def

Mos Def is one of the most creative, intelligent human beings I've had the opportunity to work with. He is fun. The entire time, he would go in and out of different characters, just for the fun of it. Awesome energy. ~ Jill Scott

African art is functional, it serves a purpose. It's not a dormant. It's not a means to collect the largest cheering section. It should be healing, a source a joy. Spreading positive vibrations. ~ Mos Def

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

My Umi said shine your light on the world, shine your light for the world to see ~ Mos Def

Bob Torricelli, Democrat member of the Senate, was basically about to be thrown out of office on corruption charges, and he went to the floor of the Senate to deny everything. And we juxtaposed his denials with an attorney from someone in an action against Torricelli who was listing all of the gifts and all the bribes that Torricelli had been given and offered in exchange for policy considerations on the Senate floor. So he's on the Senate floor denying it. ~ Rush Limbaugh

I see a huge paradox in me - the intense need to be loved and the search for approval juxtaposed with the need to nurture other people, to be the mother I never had. ~ Madonna Ciccone

It wouldn't be fair to cast aspersions on an entire cultural movement based on the actions of a few. To quote my grandfather, 'One bad apple don't spoil the whole bunch.' ~ Mos Def

Good art provides people with a vocabulary about things they can't articulate. ~ Mos Def

It's one thing to be the greatest; it's another thing to be necessary. The best are the most necessary: those who take less than they give and love more than they hate. ~ Mos Def

A foreign affair juxtaposed with a stateside
and domestically approved romantic fancy
is mysteriously attractive due to circumstances knowing
it will only be parlayed into a memory ~ Tom Waits

That idea of peace and love toward humanity shouldn't be nationalistic or denominational. It should be a chief concern for all mankind. ~ Mos Def

In the early '90s, when I really started to find my voice, I was reading a lot of books, and I was moved by the writers, like Chinua Achebe, and I wanted to be able to write rhymes that were as potent as what I was reading. ~ Mos Def