Baraka's Quotes

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

Words have users, but as well, users have words. And it is the users that establish the world's realities. — Amiri Baraka

I'm in love, with a higher love! — Sho Baraka

You can be a dreamer, but don't live in your bed. — Sho Baraka

The artist's role is to raise the consciousness of the people. — Amiri Baraka

The torture of being the unseen object, and the constantly observed subject. — Amiri Baraka

The landscape should belong to the people who see it all the time. — Amiri Baraka

A man is either free or he is not. — Amiri Baraka

Let there be no love poems written
Until love can exist freely and
Cleanly. — Amiri Baraka

Back home the black women are all beautiful — Amiri Baraka

I am a soul in the world: in
the world of my soul the whirled
light from the day
the sacked land
of my father. — Amiri Baraka

A system that warehouses people is not the cure for social ills — Amiri Baraka

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

We take unholy risks to prove we are what we cannot be. For instance, I am not even crazy. — Amiri Baraka

Warriors are poets and poems and all the loveliness here in the worlds. — Amiri Baraka

Hope is delicate suffering. — Amiri Baraka

Hip-hop, you're close to 50. When can we grow up? — Sho Baraka

From the slave ship to the citizenship we faced a lot of bullship — Amiri Baraka

& love is an evil word. Turn it backwards/see, see what I mean? An evol word. — Amiri Baraka

My responsibility is to truth and beauty. — Amiri Baraka

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

In America, black is a country. — Amiri Baraka

God is man idealized. — Amiri Baraka

There is no justice in America, but it is the fight for justice that sustains you — Amiri Baraka

Who has ever stopped to think of the divinity of Lamont Cranston? — Amiri Baraka

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

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

My influences have been what I call my four Bs - the primary one being the blues, then Borges, Baraka, and Bearden. — August Wilson

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

I'd say I'm a revolutionary optimist. I believe that the good guys -the people- are going to win. — Amiri Baraka

Smile, jew. Dance, jew. Tell me you love me, jew ... I got the extermination blues, jewboys. I got the hitler syndrome figured — Amiri Baraka

All thinking people oppose terrorism both domestic & international but one should not be used to cover the other — Amiri Baraka

There is no depth to education without art. — Amiri Baraka

The future is always here in the past — Amiri Baraka

What will be / the sacred words? — Amiri Baraka

Most American white men are trained to be fags. For this reason it is no wonder their faces are weak and blank ... — Amiri Baraka

Hunting is not those heads on the wall — Amiri Baraka

When religion and politics ride the same cart, when that cart is driven by a living holy man (baraka), nothing can stand in their path. — Frank Herbert

The point of working isn't to make money; you work to justify life. — David Baraka

Art is a weapon in the struggle of ideas, the class struggle. — Amiri Baraka

can't be rockefeller ... must be the devil — Amiri Baraka

An evil word it is/ This Love, — Amiri Baraka

James Brown and Frank Sinatra are two different quantities in the universe. They represent two different experiences of the world. — Amiri Baraka

What is lost because it is most precious
what is most precious because it is lost — Amiri Baraka

You look like death eating a soda cracker. — 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

I am inside someone who hates me. I look out from his eyes. — Amiri Baraka

Poetry is music, and nothing but music. Words with musical emphasis. — Amiri Baraka

God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air conditioning. — Amiri Baraka