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.

Art is whatever makes you proud to be human.

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

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

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.

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.

My responsibility is to truth and beauty.

There is no depth to education without art.

The future is always here in the past

In America, black is a country.

Hope is delicate suffering.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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