Top 60 Amiri Quotes
#1. I've been interested in LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's work for quite a while. My first introduction to LeRoi Jones was when my mother used to read me the 'Dead Lecturer' poems when I was a kid.
Rashid Johnson
#2. My mother introduced me to more academic-minded writers, Cornel West and Skip Gates. In her library, I came across, when I was very young, Harold Cruse's 'The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,' which is like a bible of Negro intellectuals from Frederick Douglass to Amiri Baraka.
Rashid Johnson
#3. I don't know why people always compare me [ with Amiri Baraka] I was never part of the Black Arts Repertory Theater or the Black Arts Movement; people who claim that I was are wrong. I was downtown. I was living in Chelsea when they were operating in Harlem.
Ishmael Reed
#4. As for [Amiri] Baraka, he and I have disagreements. I mean, he becomes a demagogue when there's an audience. He's a nice guy in private. I mean I like the guy; he's a terrific writer. I've published two of his books. Baraka is one of these fundamentalists who is prone to idol worship.
Ishmael Reed
#5. Warriors are poets and poems and all the loveliness here in the worlds.
Amiri Baraka
#8. Back home the black women are all beautiful
Amiri Baraka
#9. 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
#11. A rich man told me recently that a liberal is a man who tells other people what to do with their money.
Amiri Baraka
#12. 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
#13. The landscape should belong to the people who see it all the time.
Amiri Baraka
#14. Art is a weapon in the struggle of ideas, the class struggle.
Amiri Baraka
#15. God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air conditioning.
Amiri Baraka
#16. Most American white men are trained to be fags. For this reason it is no wonder their faces are weak and blank ...
Amiri Baraka
#17. From the slave ship to the citizenship we faced a lot of bullship
Amiri Baraka
#18. I'd say I'm a revolutionary optimist. I believe that the good guys -the people- are going to win.
Amiri Baraka
#20. A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom.
Amiri Baraka
#21. We take unholy risks to prove we are what we cannot be. For instance, I am not even crazy.
Amiri Baraka
#22. Trees are silent guards, they are the listeners and they hold knowledge mankind has long forgotten." - The Wolf and The Druidess
Cornelia Amiri
#23. 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
#24. James Brown and Frank Sinatra are two different quantities in the universe. They represent two different experiences of the world.
Amiri Baraka
#25. Let there be no love poems written
Until love can exist freely and
Cleanly.
Amiri Baraka
#26. There is no depth to education without art.
Amiri Baraka
#28. You look like death eating a soda cracker.
Amiri Baraka
#29. Smile, jew. Dance, jew. Tell me you love me, jew ... I got the extermination blues, jewboys. I got the hitler syndrome figured
Amiri Baraka
#30. Who has ever stopped to think of the divinity of Lamont Cranston?
Amiri Baraka
#31. 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.
Amiri Baraka
#32. The artist's role is to raise the consciousness of the people.
Amiri Baraka
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. This is said to us, even as this counterfeit president has legalized the Confederate Flag in Mississippi.
Amiri Baraka
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. I am inside someone who hates me. I look out from his eyes.
Amiri Baraka
#40. You can't be an American without being related to other Americans.
Amiri Baraka
#41. 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
#42. The torture of being the unseen object, and the constantly observed subject.
Amiri Baraka
#43. To name something is to wait for it in the place you think it will pass.
Amiri Baraka
#44. 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
#45. There is no justice in America, but it is the fight for justice that sustains you
Amiri Baraka
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. What is lost because it is most precious
what is most precious because it is lost
Amiri Baraka
#49. 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
#50. A system that warehouses people is not the cure for social ills
Amiri Baraka
#51. I tell you all the time, you will never be able to replace me with a brass and steam contraption.
Maeve Alpin
#54. Words have users, but as well, users have words. And it is the users that establish the world's realities.
Amiri Baraka
#55. can't be rockefeller ... must be the devil
Amiri Baraka
#56. & love is an evil word. Turn it backwards/see, see what I mean? An evol word.
Amiri Baraka
#57. 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
#58. All thinking people oppose terrorism both domestic & international but one should not be used to cover the other
Amiri Baraka
#59. Poetry is music, and nothing but music. Words with musical emphasis.
Amiri Baraka
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