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.
Amiri BarakaI 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.
Amiri BarakaWhen I die, the consciousness I carry I will to black people. May they pick me apart and take the useful parts, the sweet meat of my feelings. And leave the bitter bullshit rotten white parts alone.
Amiri BarakaAnd now each night, I count the stars. And each night I get the same number. And when the stars won't come to be counted, I count the holes they leave.
Amiri BarakaAll thinking people oppose terrorism both domestic & international but one should not be used to cover the other
Amiri BarakaJames Brown and Frank Sinatra are two different quantities in the universe. They represent two different experiences of the world.
Amiri BarakaIf 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 BarakaI'd say I'm a revolutionary optimist. I believe that the good guys -the people- are going to win.
Amiri BarakaThought 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 BarakaA rich man told me recently that a liberal is a man who tells other people what to do with their money.
Amiri BarakaAtheist Jews double crossers stole our [black people’s] secrets. . . . They give us to worship a dead Jew and not ourselves . . . . Selling fried potatoes and people, the little arty bastards talking arithmetic they sucked from the arab’s head.
Amiri BarakaThe further jazz moves away from the stark blue continuum and the collective realities of Afro-American and American life, the more it moves into academic concert-hall lifelessness, which can be replicated by any middle class showing off its music lessons.
Amiri BarakaMost American white men are trained to be fags. For this reason it is no wonder their faces are weak and blank.
Amiri BarakaWords have users, but as well, users have words. And it is the users that establish the world's realities.
Amiri BarakaThe attempt to divide art and politics is a bourgeois which says good poetry, art, cannot be political, but since everything is … political, even an artist or work that claims not to have any politics is making a political statement by that act.
Amiri BarakaSmile, jew. Dance, jew. Tell me you love me, jew...I got the extermination blues, jewboys. I got the hitler syndrome figured
Amiri BarakaThe African, because of the violent differences between what was native and what he was forced to in slavery, developed some of the most complex and complicated ideas about the world imaginable.
Amiri Baraka