Amiri Baraka Quotes

Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Amiri Baraka Quotes. The wide variety of quotes available makes it possible to find a quote to suit your needs. You’ve likely heard some of the Amiri Baraka Quotes before, but that’s because they truly are great.

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.

Amiri Baraka

Mao Zedong was a revolutionary. He made a revolution.

Amiri Baraka

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.

Amiri Baraka

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.

Amiri Baraka

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

Amiri Baraka

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.

Amiri Baraka

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.

Amiri Baraka

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.

Amiri Baraka

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!

Amiri Baraka

The black artist‘s role in America is to aid in the destruction of America as he knows it.

Amiri Baraka

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

Amiri Baraka

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.’

Amiri Baraka

We should understand the impact that Malcolm had on the whole of American society.

Amiri Baraka

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

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.

Amiri Baraka

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

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.

Amiri Baraka

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

Amiri Baraka

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

Amiri Baraka

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

Amiri Baraka

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

Amiri Baraka

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

Amiri Baraka