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

My responsibility is to truth and beauty.

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

In America, black is a country.

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.

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

Hope is delicate suffering.

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

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

God is man idealized.

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.

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

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

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

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.

The future is always here in the past

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

What will be / the sacred words?

An evil word it is/ This Love.

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

A man is either free or he is not.

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!

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

Let there be no love poems writtenUntil love can exist freely andCleanly.