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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
Life
Manhood
Roads
Cowardice
Loss
American
White
Black
Mainland
Men
Subservience

More quotes by Amiri Baraka

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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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You can't be an American without being related to other Americans.
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Back home the black women are all beautiful
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There is no depth to education without art.
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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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To name something is to wait for it in the place you think it will pass.
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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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An evil word it is/ This Love.
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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.
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from the slave ship to the citizenship we faced a lot of bullship
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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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There is no justice in America, but it is the fight for justice that sustains you
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& love is an evil word. Turn it backwards/see, see what I mean? An evol word.
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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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God is man idealized.
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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 system that warehouses people is not the cure for social ills
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Poetry is music, and nothing but music. Words with musical emphasis.
Amiri Baraka
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Art is whatever makes you proud to be human.
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