Words matter. These are the best Amiri Baraka Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air conditioning.
I came to my Marxist view as a result of having struggled as a nationalist and found certain dead ends theoretically and ideologically, as far as nationalism was concerned, and had to reach out for a communist ideology.
To name something is to wait for it in the place you think it will pass.
I changed my name when we became aware of the African revolution and the whole question of our African roots.
This is said to us, even as this counterfeit president has legalized the Confederate Flag in Mississippi.
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.
I was Everett LeRoi Jones. My grandfather’s name was Everett.
As a political artist, I think you have to learn how to create art, no matter what your ideology is.
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.
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.
Spike Lee is part of a retrograde movement in this country.
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.
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.
There is other disturbing facts surround the hideous 911 attacks, which my family and I could see from the third floor bathroom window of our homes!
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.
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.
I always liked jazz. And my people liked the old blues, race records and the doo-wop and all that.
I’m fully conscious all the time that I’m an American Negro, because it’s part of my life. But I also know that if I want to say, ‘I see a bus full of people,’ I don’t have to say, ‘I am a Negro seeing a bus full of people.’
You have to get an individual who’s willing to actually struggle with the system to change it. As long as you have people who – to make substantive changes, to make infrastructure changes.
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.
Alas, we have not yet the power to render completely sterile or make impossible the errors and lies which will merely be America being itself rather than its unconvincing promise.
You can’t be an American without being related to other Americans.
A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom.
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.
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.
