Amiri Baraka Quotations

This is said to us, even as this counterfeit president has legalized the Confederate Flag in Mississippi.

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

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

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.

God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air conditioning.

There is other disturbing facts surround the hideous 911 attacks, which my family and I could see from the third floor bathroom window of our homes!

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Back home the black women are all beautiful

An evil word it is/ This Love,

Who has ever stopped to think of the divinity of Lamont Cranston?

Lately, I've become accustomed to the way The ground opens up and envelopes me Each time I go out to walk the dog.

A man is either free or he is not.

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.

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

what is lost because it is most precious what is most precious because it is lost

What will be / the sacred words?

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

God is man idealized.

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.

I am a soul in the world: in the world of my soul the whirled light from the day the sacked land of my father.

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.

The future is always here in the past

Hope is delicate suffering.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

There is no depth to education without art.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Art is whatever makes you proud to be human.

My responsibility is to 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.

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

In America, black is a country.