Creativity Quote by Peter Tosh

Truth, in Peter Tosh's world, isn't a shield; it's contraband. "To have the truth in your possession" treats honesty like an illegal substance you can be caught holding, searched for, and punished over. The phrasing is street-level and legalistic at once: possession, guilt, sentencing. Tosh isn't talking about a bad argument at a dinner table. He's invoking a system where institutions decide what counts as truth and then criminalize anyone who carries a competing version in public.

The line lands with extra force because it flips a basic civic promise. Democracies sell truth as the bedrock of justice; Tosh points to the reverse, where "truth" becomes evidence against you. The subtext is the lived reality of Black dissent and anti-colonial politics in the Caribbean: police power, surveillance, informants, and the way courts can launder political repression into procedural normalcy. You don't have to be violent to be treated as a threat; you just have to be accurate about who's exploiting whom.

It's also a warning to artists. Tosh made music that named names - Babylon, oppression, hypocrisy - and the quote captures the risk of clarity. Not "speaking truth to power" in the inspirational poster sense, but the uglier calculus: once you articulate what's happening, you become legible, trackable, prosecutable. The brilliance is how he compresses an entire theory of state power into a blunt, almost casual sentence: truth doesn't merely cost you friends. In the wrong hands, it costs you your life.