Learn from your past and be better because of your past, but don’t cry about your past. Life is full of pain. Let the pain sharpen you, but don’t hold on to it. Don’t be bitter.
We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can imagine, and, depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite limited.
It didn’t matter that there was a war on our doorstep. She had things to do, places to be.
A man is not determined by how much he earns. You can still be the man of the house and earn less than your woman. Being a man is not what you have , it’s who you are. Being more of a man doesn’t mean your woman has to be less than you.
That was my mom. Don’t fight the system. Mock the system.
But regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to.
The tricky thing about the hood is that you’re always working, working, working, and you feel like something’s happening, but really nothing’s happening at all.
The world has been taught to be scared of him, but the reality is that he is scared of the world because he has none of the tools necessary to cope with it.
When you make the effort to speak someone else’s language, even if it’s just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, “I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being.
You want to live in a world where someone is good or bad. Where you either hate them or love them. But that’s not how people are.
In society, we do horrible things to one another because we don’t see the person it affects. We don’t see their face. We don’t see them as people.
Because racism exists, and you have to pick a side. You can say that you don’t pick sides, but eventually life will force you to pick a side.
In any society built on institutionalized racism, race-mixing doesn’t merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent.
Love is a creative act. When you love someone you create a new world for them. My mother did that for me, and with the progress I made and the things I learned, I came back and created a new world and a new understanding for her.
—a knowledgeable man is a free man, or at least a man who longs for freedom.
Most of my show is true; like, 90% of everything I say on stage is true. I just have to find the way to make it funny – that’s the difficult thing.
I always believe that funny is serious and serious is funny. You don’t really need a distinction between them.
My mom used to get arrested for being with my dad. She would get fined. She would spend weekends in jail.
My mom, through my dad, rented the apartment next door to his… he had the lease on both places. But then, she would dress up and act like his maid… a practical maid. No fantasies.
The older you get, the more you start to realize that you can’t win an argument in a relationship. You can’t win a fight with your woman. Because if you lose, you lose. And if you win, you lose.