Amiri Baraka Quotes & Sayings

#1. 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

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

Amiri Baraka

#3. The future is always here in the past

Amiri Baraka

#4. 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

#5. 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

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

Amiri Baraka

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

Amiri Baraka

#8. 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!

Amiri Baraka

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

Amiri Baraka

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

Amiri Baraka

#11. 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

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

Amiri Baraka

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. What is lost because it is most precious
what is most precious because it is lost

Amiri Baraka

#16. 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

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

Amiri Baraka

#18. In America, black is a country.

Amiri Baraka

#19. God is man idealized.

Amiri Baraka

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

Amiri Baraka

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

Amiri Baraka

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

Amiri Baraka

#23. 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

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

Amiri Baraka

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

Amiri Baraka

#26. What will be / the sacred words?

Amiri Baraka

#27. 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

#28. Hunting is not those heads on the wall

Amiri Baraka

#29. From the slave ship to the citizenship we faced a lot of bullship

Amiri Baraka

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

Amiri Baraka

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

Amiri Baraka

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

Amiri Baraka

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

Amiri Baraka

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

Amiri Baraka

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

Amiri Baraka

#36. A man is either free or he is not.

Amiri Baraka

#37. 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

#38. Back home the black women are all beautiful

Amiri Baraka

#39. My responsibility is to truth and beauty.

Amiri Baraka

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

Amiri Baraka

#41. Hope is delicate suffering.

Amiri Baraka

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

Amiri Baraka

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

Amiri Baraka

#44. 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