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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
Loss
American
White
Black
Mainland
Men
Subservience
Life
Manhood
Roads
Cowardice

More quotes by 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.
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Hope is delicate suffering.
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The landscape should belong to the people who see it all the time.
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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.
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There is no depth to education without art.
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The torture of being the unseen object, and the constantly observed subject.
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Who has ever stopped to think of the divinity of Lamont Cranston?
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A man is either free or he is not.
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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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God is man idealized.
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Art is a weapon in the struggle of ideas, the class struggle.
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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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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 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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Poetry is music, and nothing but music. Words with musical emphasis.
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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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& love is an evil word. Turn it backwards/see, see what I mean? An evol word.
Amiri Baraka
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There is no justice in America, but it is the fight for justice that sustains you
Amiri Baraka
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In America, black is a country.
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