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A man is either free or he is not.

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
Freedom
Free
Men
Either

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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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
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God is man idealized.
Amiri Baraka
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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.
Amiri Baraka
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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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Art is whatever makes you proud to be human.
Amiri Baraka
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A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom.
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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The torture of being the unseen object, and the constantly observed subject.
Amiri Baraka
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An evil word it is/ This Love.
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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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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Most American white men are trained to be fags. For this reason it is no wonder their faces are weak and blank.
Amiri Baraka
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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
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Hope is delicate suffering.
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 landscape should belong to the people who see it all the time.
Amiri Baraka
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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.
Amiri Baraka
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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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My responsibility is to truth and beauty.
Amiri Baraka