Amiri Baraka Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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.

  Amiri Baraka

  Artist, People, Roles

  "Revolution song" by James Campbell, www.theguardian.com. August 3, 2007.

  108 Copy quote

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

  Amiri Baraka

  Freedom, Men, Justice

  Kulchur Spring 1962 "Tokenism"

  84 Copy quote

• Art is whatever makes you proud to be human.

  Amiri Baraka

  Art, Proud, Art Is

  59 Copy quote

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

  Amiri Baraka

  Fighting, America, Justice

  73 Copy quote

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

  Amiri Baraka

  Pain, Unseen, Torture

  Amiri Baraka (2016). “System of Dante's Hell”, p.158, Akashic Books

  59 Copy quote

• 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.

  Amiri Baraka

  Art, Clothes, People

  69 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Political, Claims

  69 Copy quote

• My responsibility is to truth and beauty.

  Amiri Baraka

  Responsibility, Truth And Beauty

  "Connie Chung Tonight", www.cnn.com. October 2, 2002.

  55 Copy quote

• There is no depth to education without art.

  Amiri Baraka

  Art, Depth

  Amiri Baraka (2009). “Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music”, p.108, Univ of California Press

  48 Copy quote

• The future is always here in the past

  Amiri Baraka

  Past

  7 Copy quote

• In America, black is a country.

  Amiri Baraka

  Country, America, Racism

  Amiri Baraka (2009). “Home: Social Essays”, Akashic Books

  50 Copy quote

• Hope is delicate suffering.

  Amiri Baraka

  Hope, Suffering, Delicate

  18 Copy quote

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

  Amiri Baraka

  Art, Struggle, Class

  "Art is a weapon in the struggle of ideas: interviewing amiri baraka". Interview With Sophie Erskine, www.3ammagazine.com.

  19 Copy quote

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

  Amiri Baraka

  Slave Ships, Ships, Citizenship

  41 Copy quote

• 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

  Moving, Reality, Blue

  Imamu Amiri Baraka (1984). “Daggers and javelins: essays, 1974-1979”, William Morrow & Co

  60 Copy quote

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

  Amiri Baraka

  Believe, Winning, People

  49 Copy quote

• 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

  Sweet, White, People

  "Amiri Baraka: Poet Laureate" by Saul Williams, www.thefader.com. November 2004.

  45 Copy quote

• 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

  Loss, Men, White Man

  29 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Learning, Understanding

  49 Copy quote

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

  Amiri Baraka

  Thinking, People, Terrorism

  47 Copy quote

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

  Amiri Baraka

  Warrior, World, Poet

  27 Copy quote

• 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

  Government, Enemy, Flags

  9 Copy quote

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

  Amiri Baraka

  Musical, Emphasis, Poetry Is

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  Amiri Baraka

  Hate, Eye, Smell

  Amiri Baraka (2015). “S O S: Poems 1961-2013”, p.67, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  43 Copy quote

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

  Amiri Baraka

  Two, Different Experiences, World

  16 Copy quote

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