Amiri Baraka Quotes

A man is either free or he is not.

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

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.

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

What will be / the sacred words?

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

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

Back home the black women are all beautiful

You look like death eating a soda cracker.

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

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

This development signified also that jazz would someday have to contend with the idea of its being an art (since that was the white man's only way into it). The emergence of the white player meant that Afro-American culture had already become the expression of a particular kind of American experience, and what is most important, that this experience was available intellectually, that it could be learned.

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

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.

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.

can't be rockefeller ... must be the devil

We take unholy risks to prove we are what we cannot be. For instance, I am not even crazy.

God is man idealized.

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.

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

The artist's role is to raise the consciousness of the people.

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.

An evil word it is/ This Love,

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

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.

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

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.

It's so diffuse
being alive. Suddenly one is aware
that nobody really gives a damn.

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

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

My responsibility is to truth and beauty.

In America, black is a country.

Hunting is not those heads on the wall

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.

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

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

There is no depth to education without art.

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