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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

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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
Even
Since
Divide
Work
Politics
Divides
Good
Making
Statement
Artist
Statements
Art
Attempt
Political
Claims
Cannot
Poetry
Everything
Says
Bourgeois

More quotes by Amiri Baraka

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My responsibility is to truth and beauty.
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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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All thinking people oppose terrorism both domestic & international but one should not be used to cover the other
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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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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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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 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.
Amiri Baraka
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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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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
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Who has ever stopped to think of the divinity of Lamont Cranston?
Amiri Baraka
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There is no depth to education without art.
Amiri Baraka
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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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What will be / the sacred words?
Amiri Baraka
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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.
Amiri Baraka
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In America, black is a country.
Amiri Baraka
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The future is always here in the past
Amiri Baraka
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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.
Amiri Baraka
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I'd say I'm a revolutionary optimist. I believe that the good guys -the people- are going to win.
Amiri Baraka