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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
White
Black
Mainland
Men
Subservience
Life
Manhood
Roads
Cowardice
Loss
American

More quotes by Amiri Baraka

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What will be / the sacred words?
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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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A system that warehouses people is not the cure for social ills
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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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& love is an evil word. Turn it backwards/see, see what I mean? An evol word.
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An evil word it is/ This Love.
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There is no depth to education without art.
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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.
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Poetry is music, and nothing but music. Words with musical emphasis.
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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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There is no justice in America, but it is the fight for justice that sustains you
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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
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My responsibility is to truth and beauty.
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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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The films of Warhol, when they are about anything are about sucking people off. This can be high art, to people who are interested in sucking people off. But that will not liberate Black people.
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Art is a weapon in the struggle of ideas, the class struggle.
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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A man is either free or he is not.
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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.
Amiri Baraka