Quotes from will.i.am

There are five issues that make a fist of a hand that can knock America out cold. They're lack of jobs, obesity, diabetes, homelessness, and lack of good education.

I rescue families who are losing their homes because they have no jobs and they can't pay the mortgage and the banks are foreclosing on their homes.

I don't want to hope anymore. I don't think we should hope anymore. We hoped enough. Now we have to do. We all have to do now.

I don't follow waves or trends or emotions.

You could use artificial intelligence to build a system around postcodes and income, which could lead to racial profiling.

Hip-hop is limiting itself and that also goes for editorially. Magazines and websites are the gatekeepers of what people think hip-hop is, but they actually end up limiting what hip-hop can be.

I was born and raised in the ghetto, on welfare, two minutes from homeless.

What Autotune allows is for people like myself and Kanye West not to depend on the singer. Back in the Fifties, the songwriter was rendered invisible. Now the songwriter is there in the forefront.

I don't want to preach to people.

I don't despise people.

It should be mandatory that you understand computer science.

Why shouldn't a child look to want to be a political figure, to change our nation, to lead us the right directions?

If you live in a good neighborhood, you drive home and there's a bank. There's grocery stores and big houses - but no motels. What that tells you psychologically is you protect your money and buy good things for your family to eat in your nice big house.

Every year there's an Oscar and Grammy and we celebrate those shows. We do the same in the U.S about sports schools and colleges. The same thing doesn't happen for tech and STEM.

Here's the problem: Profiteers haunt America, and for everything we try to control, someone's going to profit from it, more than you control it.

Most kids are not dreaming of being programmers, scientists or engineers.

I'd like to see Apple and Dell factories be brought to the inner cities; in every project in America, there's some factory there, and it's abandoned, and I'd like to see those factories open and bring jobs to America.

We need to forge a whole new energy and American Dream.

I'm fascinated with quantum physics.

I can't be quiet, as that's when I notice the ringing in my ears.

I know people in gangs; I could have went down that route.

It's dangerous to be a child star, but it's dangerous to be a child in the ghetto, or to be a child at school being bullied.

Music is my therapy and my straitjacket. Music keeps me sane and keeps my mind on something. It's fragile up there.

We all rely on technology to communicate, to survive, to do our banking, to shop, to get informed, but none of us knows how to read and write the code.