Amiri Baraka famous quotes

A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Men #Justice #Social Justice

The further jazz moves away from the stark blue continuum and the collective realities of Afro-American and American life, the more it moves into academic concert-hall lifelessness, which can be replicated by any middle class showing off its music lessons.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Moving #Reality #Blue

Thought is more important than art....To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Art #Understanding #Important

The African, because of the violent differences between what was native and what he was forced to in slavery, developed some of the most complex and complicated ideas about the world imaginable.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Ideas #Differences #World

The artist's role is to raise the consciousness of the people. To make them understand life, the world and themselves more completely. That's how I see it. Otherwise, I don't know why you do it.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Artist #People #Roles

And now each night, I count the stars. And each night I get the same number. And when the stars won't come to be counted, I count the holes they leave.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Stars #Night #Numbers

My responsibility is to truth and beauty.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Responsibility #Truth And Beauty

The attempt to divide art and politics is a bourgeois which says good poetry, art, cannot be political, but since everything is … political, even an artist or work that claims not to have any politics is making a political statement by that act.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Art #Political #Claims

Art is whatever makes you proud to be human.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Art #Proud #Art Is

There is no depth to education without art.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Art #Depth

I'd say I'm a revolutionary optimist. I believe that the good guys -the people- are going to win.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Believe #Winning #People

Warriors are poets and poems and all the loveliness here in the worlds.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Warrior #World #Poet

There is no justice in America, but it is the fight for justice that sustains you
-- Amiri Baraka

#Fighting #America #Justice

from the slave ship to the citizenship we faced a lot of bullship
-- Amiri Baraka

#Ships #Citizenship #Slave

The word “art” is something the West has never understood. Art is supposed to be a part of a community. Like, scholars are supposed to be a part of a community... Art is to decorate people’s houses, their skin, their clothes, to make them expand their minds, and it’s supposed to be right in the community, where they can have it when they want it... It’s supposed to be as essential as a grocery store... that’s the only way art can function naturally.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Art #Clothes #People

To name something is to wait for it in the place you think it will pass.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Thinking #Names #Waiting

The future is always here in the past
-- Amiri Baraka

#Past

You can't be an American without being related to other Americans.
-- Amiri Baraka

I guess I was the most unbohemian of all bohemians. My bohemianism consisted of not wanting to get involved with the stupid stuff that I thought people wanted you to get involved with - ... namely America... Dwight Eisenhower, McCarthyism and all those great things.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Stupid #America #People

If the flag of an armed enemy of the U.S. is allowed to fly over government buildings, then it implies that slavery, or at least the threat of slavery, is sanctioned by that government and can still legally exist.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Government #Enemy #Flags

I am inside someone who hates me. I look out from his eyes. Smell what fouled tunes come in to his breath. Love his wretched women.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Hate #Eye #Smell

what is lost because it is most precious what is most precious because it is lost
-- Amiri Baraka

#Lost

I am inside someone who hates me. I look out from his eyes.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Hate #Eye #Looks

A system that warehouses people is not the cure for social ills
-- Amiri Baraka

#People #Social #Cures

A rich man told me recently that a liberal is a man who tells other people what to do with their money.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Money #Men #People

& love is an evil word. Turn it backwards/see, see what I mean? An evol word.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Mean #Love Is #Evil

The landscape should belong to the people who see it all the time.
-- Amiri Baraka

#People #Landscape #Ownership

In America, black is a country.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Country #America #Racism

Poetry is music, and nothing but music. Words with musical emphasis.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Musical #Emphasis #Poetry Is

Art is a weapon in the struggle of ideas, the class struggle.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Art #Struggle #Class

The torture of being the unseen object, and the constantly observed subject.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Pain #Unseen #Torture

James Brown and Frank Sinatra are two different quantities in the universe. They represent two different experiences of the world.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Two #Different #World

God is man idealized.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Men #Atheism

Smile, jew. Dance, jew. Tell me you love me, jew...I got the extermination blues, jewboys. I got the hitler syndrome figured
-- Amiri Baraka

#Syndromes #Tell Me You Love Me #Jew

An evil word it is/ This Love,
-- Amiri Baraka

#Evil

Atheist Jews double crossers stole our [black people’s] secrets. . . . They give us to worship a dead Jew and not ourselves . . . . Selling fried potatoes and people, the little arty bastards talking arithmetic they sucked from the arab’s head.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Atheist #Talking #People

What will be / the sacred words?
-- Amiri Baraka

#Sacred

The films of Warhol, when they are about anything are about sucking people off. This can be high art, to people who are interested in sucking people off. But that will not liberate Black people.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Art #People #Black

Words have users, but as well, users have words. And it is the users that establish the world's realities.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Reality #World #Wells

Hope is delicate suffering.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Hope #Suffering #Delicate

Most American white men are trained to be fags. For this reason it is no wonder their faces are weak and blank...
-- Amiri Baraka

#Men #White #Faces

When I die, the consciousness I carry I will to black people./May they pick me apart and take the useful parts, the sweet meat of my feelings./And leave the bitter bullshit rotten white parts alone.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Sweet #White #People

All thinking people oppose terrorism both domestic & international but one should not be used to cover the other
-- Amiri Baraka

#Thinking #People #Terrorism

If you are black, the only roads into the mainland of American life are through subservience, cowardice, and loss of manhood. These are the white man's roads.
-- Amiri Baraka

#Loss #Men #White