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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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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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& love is an evil word. Turn it backwards/see, see what I mean? An evol word.
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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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Art is a weapon in the struggle of ideas, the class struggle.
Amiri Baraka
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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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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
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You can't be an American without being related to other Americans.
Amiri Baraka
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God is man idealized.
Amiri Baraka
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The torture of being the unseen object, and the constantly observed subject.
Amiri Baraka
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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.
Amiri Baraka
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The future is always here in the past
Amiri Baraka
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Back home the black women are all beautiful
Amiri Baraka
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There is no depth to education without art.
Amiri Baraka
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My responsibility is to truth and beauty.
Amiri Baraka
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Who has ever stopped to think of the divinity of Lamont Cranston?
Amiri Baraka
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A system that warehouses people is not the cure for social ills
Amiri Baraka
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The landscape should belong to the people who see it all the time.
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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Warriors are poets and poems and all the loveliness here in the worlds.
Amiri Baraka
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Art is whatever makes you proud to be human.
Amiri Baraka