Amiri Baraka Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

Art is whatever makes you proud to be human.

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

My responsibility is to truth and beauty.

In America, black is a country.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Hope is delicate suffering.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Back home the black women are all beautiful

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.

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

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.

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.

The future is always here in the past

A man is either free or he is not.

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

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.

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

An evil word it is/ This Love.