Quotes from Amiri Baraka

A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom.

The major poets of New Jersey have all suffered, whether it's Whitman, who lost his job for 'Leaves of Grass,' or William Carlos Williams, who was called a communist, or Ginsberg, whose 'Howl' was prosecuted, or myself. If you practise poetry the way I think it needs to be done, you're going to put yourself in jeopardy.

I was Everett LeRoi Jones. My grandfather's name was Everett.

If the flag of an armed enemy of the U.S. is allowed to fly over government buildings, then it implies that slavery, or at least the threat of slavery, is sanctioned by that government and can still legally exist.

Lately, I've become accustomed to the way The ground opens up and envelopes me Each time I go out to walk the dog.

You can't be an American without being related to other Americans.

As a political artist, I think you have to learn how to create art, no matter what your ideology is.

Jimmy Baldwin was not only a writer, an international literary figure: he was a man, spirit, voice - old and black and terrible as that first ancestor.

My responsibility is to truth and beauty.

I had just been in some repressive situations - the black middle-class college scene and the crazy United States Air Force - and so I just felt like getting out of that. I thought, now, that I wanted to be a writer. I had something that I wanted to do, that I was interested in doing, so I wanted to pursue that.

An evil word it is/ This Love.

I always liked jazz. And my people liked the old blues, race records and the doo-wop and all that.

My family came to Newark in the '20s. We've been there a long, long time. My father's name was LeRoi, the French-ified aspect of it, because his first name was Coyette, you see. They come from South Carolina.

Let there be no love poems writtenUntil love can exist freely andCleanly.

This is said to us, even as this counterfeit president has legalized the Confederate Flag in Mississippi.

I met Malcolm the month before he was killed. He deeply changed my mind about America.

I had a little portable typewriter. I call it my Harlem Literary Fellowship.

Spike Lee is part of a retrograde movement in this country.

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.

My own thinking has evolved. You find Africanisms in American speech. You find an African influence on United States culture. There are all kinds of Africanisms in America, as you would expect, if you really thought about it... That whole thing is much broader; the influence is much broader than I first understood.

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.

Jimmy Baldwin was the creator of contemporary American speech even before Americans could dig that. He created it so we could speak to each other at unimaginable intensities of feeling, so we could make sense to each other at yet higher and higher tempos.

Howard University shocked me into realizing how desperately sick the Negro could be, how he could be led into self-destruction, and how he would not realize that it was the society that had forced him into a great sickness.

Back home the black women are all beautiful