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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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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
Cowardice
Loss
American
White
Black
Mainland
Men
Subservience
Life
Manhood
Roads

More quotes by Amiri Baraka

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In America, black is a country.
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I am inside someone who hates me. I look out from his eyes. Smell what fouled tunes come in to his breath. Love his wretched women.
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Poetry is music, and nothing but music. Words with musical emphasis.
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what is lost because it is most precious what is most precious because it is lost
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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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Warriors are poets and poems and all the loveliness here in the worlds.
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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 artist's role is to raise the consciousness of the people. To make them understand life, the world and themselves more completely. That's how I see it. Otherwise, I don't know why you do it.
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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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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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I'd say I'm a revolutionary optimist. I believe that the good guys -the people- are going to win.
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The future is always here in the past
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God is man idealized.
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My responsibility is to truth and beauty.
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An evil word it is/ This Love.
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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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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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What will be / the sacred words?
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Art is whatever makes you proud to be human.
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There is no justice in America, but it is the fight for justice that sustains you
Amiri Baraka