Home: Social Essays
A source page for quotes linked to Amiri Baraka.
“It's so diffuse being alive. Suddenly one is aware that nobody really gives a damn.”
“You can't be an American without being related to other Americans.”
“Back home the black women are all beautiful”
“Who has ever stopped to think of the divinity of Lamont Cranston?”
“what is lost because it is most precious what is most precious because it is lost”
“I am inside someone who hates me. I look out from his eyes.”
“A system that warehouses people is not the cure for social ills”
“There is no justice in America, but it is the fight for justice that sustains you”
“from the slave ship to the citizenship we faced a lot of bullship”
“& love is an evil word. Turn it backwards/see, see what I mean? An evol word.”
“A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom.”
“The landscape should belong to the people who see it all the time.”
“The torture of being the unseen object, and the constantly observed subject.”
“In America, black is a country.”
“Art is a weapon in the struggle of ideas, the class struggle.”
“Poetry is music, and nothing but music. Words with musical emphasis.”
“There is no depth to education without art.”
“To name something is to wait for it in the place you think it will pass.”
“Warriors are poets and poems and all the loveliness here in the worlds.”
“What will be / the sacred words?”
“I'd say I'm a revolutionary optimist. I believe that the good guys -the people- are going to win.”