Amiri Baraka

“When I was saying, 'White people go to hell,' I never had trouble finding a publisher. But when I say, 'Black and white unite and fight, destroy capitalism,' then you suddenly become unreasonable.”

“The poet is someone, I think, who's interested in registering experience immediately or giving you the sense of immediacy and directness.”

“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.”

“Mao Zedong was a revolutionary. He made a revolution.”

“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.”

“A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom.”

“You have to start with slavery because those abuses have never been eradicated. You know, people are not living in slums because they voted to. You know, their children are not in jail because they wanted them to. You know, these are the results of a people who have been oppressed and suffer national oppression, you know.”

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

“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.”

“Jimmy Baldwin was the creator of contemporary American speech even before Americans could dig that. He created it so we could speak to each other at unimaginable intensities of feeling, so we could make sense to each other at yet higher and higher tempos.”

“'Griot' is a French word which means, you know, really, literally, 'cry.' You know, like the town crier. You know, they come in and say, you know, 'It's nine o'clock; everything is cool.' You know, 'President Bush is a fool.' I mean, stuff like that just to tell you. But for the kind of, the African thing is called djali.”

“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.”

“& love is an evil word. Turn it backwards/see, see what I mean? An evol word.”

“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.”

“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.'”

“America is as much a black country as a white one. The lives and destinies of the white American are bound up inextricably with those of the black American.”

“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.”

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

“You can't be an American without being related to other Americans.”

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