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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.

Amiri Baraka

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Amiri Baraka
Age: 20 †
Born: 1934
Born: October 7
Died: 1914
Died: January 9
Critic
Essayist
Journalist
Music Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Newark
New Jersey
Imamu Amear Baraka
LeRoi Jones
Everett LeRoi Jones
Count
Holes
Number
Leave
Numbers
Stars
Night
Come
Counted

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To name something is to wait for it in the place you think it will pass.
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Most American white men are trained to be fags. For this reason it is no wonder their faces are weak and blank.
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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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My responsibility is to truth and beauty.
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I am inside someone who hates me. I look out from his eyes.
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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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A system that warehouses people is not the cure for social ills
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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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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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Who has ever stopped to think of the divinity of Lamont Cranston?
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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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Art is a weapon in the struggle of ideas, the class struggle.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom.
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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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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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Poetry is music, and nothing but music. Words with musical emphasis.
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