Quotes from Amiri Baraka

The white man is in love with the past, with dead things, and soon he will become one.

The horizontal quality of black life, that is, the smashed flat quality of life for the oppressed, proposes that we is all generally equally mashed.

And now, each night I count the stars, And each night I get the same number. And when they will not come to be counted, I count the holes they leave.

The idea that came through in the Renaissance and took hold of the West was that life was no mere anteroom for something greater or divine. Life itself was of value--and could be made perfect.

The radio, I've told over and again, was always another school for my mind. I listened to the radio all my young life, seriously and continuously, changing my focus, I guess, as I changed. The TV must serve the same purpose now for kids.

Having read all of whitie's books, I wanted to be an authority on them. Having been taught that art was "what white men do," I almost became one, to have a go at it.

There are black men who love the white man so dearly, who love, I must suppose, the nice warm feeling of shoe sole on their woolly heads, that they would do nothing to see that the white man relinquishes his stranglehold on the world.

There was no communication between master and slave on any strictly human level, but only the relation one might have to a piece of property--if you twist the knob on your radio you expect it to play. It was this essential condition of nonhumanity that characterized the African slave's lot in this country of his captivity, a country which was later and ironically to become his land also.

We try to make theories of our perception. We try to explain what was or is making repeated indents upon our senses, life. We rationalize and give something a name, a number, try to recognize a persistent quality to some element of sorrow, distance, feeling.

If we live all our lives under lies, it becomes difficult to see anything if it does not have anything to do with these lies. If it is, for example, true or, say, honest.

Childhood is like a mist in so many ways. A mist in which a you is moving to become another you.

There are things, elements in the world, that continue to exist, for whatever time, completely liberated from our delusion. They press us also, and we, of course, if we are to preserve the sullen but comfortable vacuum we inhabit, must deny that anyone else could possibly tolerate what we all agree is a hellish world.

Walk it slowwhere you gowalk it slow…We in the worldPoor as dirtDon't get some rhythmSomebody'll get hurtthe world is blackthe world is greenthe world is red, yellow, brownthe world is mean

Lately, I've become accustomed to the wayThe ground opens up and envelops meEach time I go out to walk the dog.

Saturday mornings we listened to Red Lantern& his undersea folk.At 11, Let's Pretend / & we did / & I, the poet, still do, Thank God!

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

Art is whatever makes you proud to be human.

God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air conditioning.

There will be, and should be, reams and reams of analysis, even praise, for our friend but also even larger measures of non-analysis and, certainly, condemnation for James Baldwin, the Negro writer.

'Griot' is a French word which means, you know, really, literally, 'cry.' You know, like the town crier. You know, they come in and say, you know, 'It's nine o'clock; everything is cool.' You know, 'President Bush is a fool.' I mean, stuff like that just to tell you. But for the kind of, the African thing is called djali.

Smile, jew. Dance, jew. Tell me you love me, jew...I got the extermination blues, jewboys. I got the hitler syndrome figured

The man who buried Malcolm X - my Muslim imam, priest - he, after I got beat up by police... came to me, and he said, 'You don't need this American name.' And I was susceptible to it at the time because, God knows, I had just gotten whipped near to death. So he gave me an Arab name; he gave me the name Amir Barakat.

When I was saying, 'White people go to hell,' I never had trouble finding a publisher. But when I say, 'Black and white unite and fight, destroy capitalism,' then you suddenly become unreasonable.

It seems natural to me that as a writer, you should have some kind of, you know, there should be some kind of projection that you actually have influenced people who are closest to you.