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My responsibility is to truth and beauty.

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
Responsibility
Beauty
Truth

More quotes by Amiri Baraka

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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.
Amiri Baraka
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I am inside someone who hates me. I look out from his eyes.
Amiri Baraka
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A man is either free or he is not.
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
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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.
Amiri Baraka
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Words have users, but as well, users have words. And it is the users that establish the world's realities.
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.
Amiri Baraka
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There is no depth to education without art.
Amiri Baraka
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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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Poetry is music, and nothing but music. Words with musical emphasis.
Amiri Baraka
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To name something is to wait for it in the place you think it will pass.
Amiri Baraka
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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
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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
Amiri Baraka
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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.
Amiri Baraka
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Who has ever stopped to think of the divinity of Lamont Cranston?
Amiri Baraka
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The future is always here in the past
Amiri Baraka
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Art is a weapon in the struggle of ideas, the class struggle.
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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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
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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.
Amiri Baraka