Amiri Baraka Quotes
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The torture of being the unseen object, and the constantly observed subject.
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In America, black is a country.
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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.
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I am inside someone who hates me. I look out from his eyes.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A man is either free or he is not.
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To name something is to wait for it in the place you think it will pass.
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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.
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My responsibility is to truth and beauty.
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James Brown and Frank Sinatra are two different quantities in the universe. They represent two different experiences of the world.
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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.
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There is no justice in America, but it is the fight for justice that sustains you
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Words have users, but as well, users have words. And it is the users that establish the world's realities.
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A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom.
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Who has ever stopped to think of the divinity of Lamont Cranston?
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Smile, jew. Dance, jew. Tell me you love me, jew...I got the extermination blues, jewboys. I got the hitler syndrome figured
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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.
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The landscape should belong to the people who see it all the time.
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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.
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Poetry is music, and nothing but music. Words with musical emphasis.
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A rich man told me recently that a liberal is a man who tells other people what to do with their money.
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Art is whatever makes you proud to be human.
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& love is an evil word. Turn it backwards/see, see what I mean? An evol word.
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Lately, I've become accustomed to the way The ground opens up and envelopes me Each time I go out to walk the dog.
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A system that warehouses people is not the cure for social ills
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All thinking people oppose terrorism both domestic & international but one should not be used to cover the other
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The future is always here in the past
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Warriors are poets and poems and all the loveliness here in the worlds.
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