Quotes from Amiri Baraka

Mao Zedong was a revolutionary. He made a revolution.

I changed my name when we became aware of the African revolution and the whole question of our African roots.

You have to start with slavery because those abuses have never been eradicated. You know, people are not living in slums because they voted to. You know, their children are not in jail because they wanted them to. You know, these are the results of a people who have been oppressed and suffer national oppression, you know.

To name something is to wait for it in the place you think it will pass.

America is as much a black country as a white one. The lives and destinies of the white American are bound up inextricably with those of the black American.

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.

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.

A man is either free or he is not.

A rich man told me recently that a liberal is a man who tells other people what to do with their money.

Poetry is music, and nothing but music. Words with musical emphasis.

God is man idealized.

Hope is delicate suffering.

I'm trying to make the poems as musical as I can - from the inception. So that whether they're read on the page, or people read them aloud, or I read them aloud, the musicality will be kind of a given.

The poet is someone, I think, who's interested in registering experience immediately or giving you the sense of immediacy and directness.

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.

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.

Nonviolence, as a theory of social and political demeanor concerning American Negroes, means simply a continuation of the status quo.

The grey steel streets were indeed paltry (not our feelings, and no, not the blues) but those gray streets were dead and cold, despite our warm living selves celebrating the life in us dancing across their surfaces.

Love is an evil word. Turn it backwards. See, see what I mean?

The clear-headed will see the striking gain I've made since I did find a woman, in the real world, whose life was connected up with mine and mine with hers before we knew anything about each other.

I have been a lot of places in my time, and done a lot of things. And there is a sense of Prodigal about my life that begs to be resolved. But one truth anyone reading these pieces ought to get is the sense of movement--the struggle, in myself, to understand where and who I am, and to move with that understanding.

It seems my life plagues a few people. They want to "know" how I got wherever they perceive I am. Why I would leave where they "thought" I was in the first place. But was I ever there, where they thunk? And where was they?

And later in school I developed an interior life that was split obviously like the exterior life. One half-tied to Dey Street while we still lived there and the black life of the playground and streets. And the other tied to the school experiences of McKinley and Barringer. It must be true, maybe obvious, that the schizophrenic tenor of some of my life gets fueled from these initial sources (and farther back with words whispered into the little boy's ear, from mouths and radios).

The Black Artist's role in America is to aid in the destruction of America as he knows it.