Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Roads
Cowardice
Loss
American
White
Black
Mainland
Men
Subservience
Life
Manhood

More quotes by Amiri Baraka

Image
A system that warehouses people is not the cure for social ills
Amiri Baraka
Image
Art is whatever makes you proud to be human.
Amiri Baraka
Image
Who has ever stopped to think of the divinity of Lamont Cranston?
Amiri Baraka
Image
You can't be an American without being related to other Americans.
Amiri Baraka
Image
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.
Amiri Baraka
Image
To name something is to wait for it in the place you think it will pass.
Amiri Baraka
Image
The landscape should belong to the people who see it all the time.
Amiri Baraka
Image
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
Image
The future is always here in the past
Amiri Baraka
Image
My responsibility is to truth and beauty.
Amiri Baraka
Image
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.
Amiri Baraka
Image
I am inside someone who hates me. I look out from his eyes.
Amiri Baraka
Image
Hope is delicate suffering.
Amiri Baraka
Image
An evil word it is/ This Love.
Amiri Baraka
Image
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
Image
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.
Amiri Baraka
Image
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
Image
I'd say I'm a revolutionary optimist. I believe that the good guys -the people- are going to win.
Amiri Baraka
Image
Poetry is music, and nothing but music. Words with musical emphasis.
Amiri Baraka
Image
Words have users, but as well, users have words. And it is the users that establish the world's realities.
Amiri Baraka