35 Quotes by Amiri Baraka
Amiri Baraka was an influential African American poet, playwright, and activist who played a key role in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. He was a fierce critic of racism and imperialism and used his writing to challenge the status quo and inspire social change. Baraka's work was often controversial, but his impact on American literature and politics remains significant to this day. (Bio)
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. (Meaning)
A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom. (Meaning)
There is no justice in America, but it is the fight for justice that sustains you
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.
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 whatever makes you proud to be human.
The torture of being the unseen object, and the constantly observed subject.
My responsibility is to truth and beauty.
In America, black is a country.
I'd say I'm a revolutionary optimist. I believe that the good guys -the people- are going to win.
There is no depth to education without art.
All thinking people oppose terrorism both domestic & international but one should not be used to cover the other
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.
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.
Hope is delicate suffering.
Art is a weapon in the struggle of ideas, the class struggle.
James Brown and Frank Sinatra are two different quantities in the universe. They represent two different experiences of the world.
The landscape should belong to the people who see it all the time.
God is man idealized.
A system that warehouses people is not the cure for social ills
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.
& 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.
Back home the black women are all beautiful
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.
The future is always here in the past
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.
A man is either free or he is not.
― Amiri Baraka Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
