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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
Black
Mainland
Men
Subservience
Life
Manhood
Roads
Cowardice
Loss
American
White

More quotes by 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.
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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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An evil word it is/ This Love.
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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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In America, black is a country.
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The torture of being the unseen object, and the constantly observed subject.
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A system that warehouses people is not the cure for social ills
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Art is a weapon in the struggle of ideas, the class struggle.
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The future is always here in the past
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God is man idealized.
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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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Lately, I've become accustomed to the way The ground opens up and envelopes me Each time I go out to walk the dog.
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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.
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Poetry is music, and nothing but music. Words with musical emphasis.
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Art is whatever makes you proud to be human.
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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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Warriors are poets and poems and all the loveliness here in the worlds.
Amiri Baraka
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from the slave ship to the citizenship we faced a lot of bullship
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Hope is delicate suffering.
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