Amiri Quotes & Sayings

Smile, jew. Dance, jew. Tell me you love me, jew ... I got the extermination blues, jewboys. I got the hitler syndrome figured — Amiri Baraka

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

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

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

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

I tell you all the time, you will never be able to replace me with a brass and steam contraption. — Maeve Alpin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

& love is an evil word. Turn it backwards/see, see what I mean? An evol word. — Amiri Baraka

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

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

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

Let there be no love poems written
Until love can exist freely and
Cleanly. — Amiri Baraka

A system that warehouses people is not the cure for social ills — Amiri Baraka

Poems are bullshit unless they are

teeth or trees or lemons piled

on a step. Or black ladies dying

of men leaving nickel hearts

beating them down. Fuck poems

and they are useful, wd they shoot

come at you, love what you are,

breathe like wrestlers, or shudder

strangely after pissing. We want live

words of the hip world live flesh &

coursing blood. Hearts Brains

Souls splintering fire. We want poems

like fists beating niggers out of Jocks

or dagger poems in the slimy bellies

of the owner-jews. Black poems to

smear on girdlemamma mulatto bitches

whose brains are red jelly stuck

between 'lizabeth taylor's toes. Stinking

Whores! we want "poems that kill. — Amiri Baraka

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

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

Who has ever stopped to think of the divinity of Lamont Cranston? — Amiri Baraka

Hope is delicate suffering. — Amiri Baraka

A man is either free or he is not. — Amiri Baraka

This is said to us, even as this counterfeit president has legalized the Confederate Flag in Mississippi. — Amiri Baraka

The future is always here in the past — Amiri Baraka

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

You can't be an American without being related to other Americans. — Amiri Baraka

My responsibility is to truth and beauty. — Amiri Baraka

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

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

The landscape should belong to the people who see it all the time. — Amiri Baraka

You look like death eating a soda cracker. — Amiri Baraka

Trees are silent guards, they are the listeners and they hold knowledge mankind has long forgotten." - The Wolf and The Druidess — Cornelia Amiri

Hunting is not those heads on the wall — Amiri Baraka

In America, black is a country. — Amiri Baraka

In 1967, the students at San Francisco State invited the poet Amiri Baraka to the campus for a semester. He attracted other influential black writers such as Sonia Sanchez, Ed Bullins, Eldridge Cleaver. What emerged was something we called the community communications program. That's how I got involved; I got involved in a little play. — Danny Glover

The artist's role is to raise the consciousness of the people. — Amiri Baraka

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

What is lost because it is most precious
what is most precious because it is lost — Amiri Baraka

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

Words have users, but as well, users have words. And it is the users that establish the world's realities. — Amiri Baraka

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

From the slave ship to the citizenship we faced a lot of bullship — Amiri Baraka

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

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

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

This development signified also that jazz would someday have to contend with the idea of its being an art (since that was the white man's only way into it). The emergence of the white player meant that Afro-American culture had already become the expression of a particular kind of American experience, and what is most important, that this experience was available intellectually, that it could be learned. — Amiri Baraka

Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammed, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, Amiri Baraka and other black male leaders have righteously supported patriarchy. They have all argued that it is absolutely necessary for black men to relegate black women to a subordinate position both in the political sphere and in home life. — Bell Hooks

I was roommates with 2 of the guys who were influential in forming the Black Arts philosophy. I called them "goons," and [Amiri] Baraka took offense at that. But if you read his autobiography, the night we went up there for a fundraiser, he talks about how he wished that some violence would happen to us. How do you like Baraka as a gracious host? — Ishmael Reed

I am inside someone who hates me. I look out from his eyes. — Amiri Baraka

God is man idealized. — Amiri Baraka

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

can't be rockefeller ... must be the devil — Amiri Baraka

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

From Borges, those wonderful gaucho stories from which I learned that you can be specific as to a time and place and culture and still have the work resonate with the universal themes of love, honor, duty, betrayal, etc. From Amiri Baraka, I learned that all art is political, although I don't write political plays. — August Wilson

God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air conditioning. — Amiri Baraka

There is no depth to education without art. — Amiri Baraka

What will be / the sacred words? — Amiri Baraka

Black music has always known, and not been afraid to acknowledge just how high the stakes of Black thought are. To summarize the final soliloquy of Clay, the protagonist in LeRoi Jones' (aka Amiri Baraka's) play Dutchman. You'd better be glad Charlie Parker could play him some horn and Bessie Smith could sing, because if they didn't make music they might murder you. One would be hard pressed to find another group of people on this planet whose music is a surrogate for murder. One would be hard pressed to another group of people on this planet whose life is a proxy for death. — Frank B. Wilderson III

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

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

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

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

An evil word it is/ This Love, — Amiri Baraka

Back home the black women are all beautiful — Amiri Baraka

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