Top 35 Amiri Baraka Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Hope is delicate suffering.”

— Amiri Baraka

2. “There is no depth to education without art.”

— Amiri Baraka

3. “Poetry is music, and nothing but music. Words with musical emphasis.”

— Amiri Baraka

4. “Most American white men are trained to be fags. For this reason it is no wonder their faces are weak and blank...”

— Amiri Baraka

5. “And 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 Baraka

6. “The future is always here in the past.”

— Amiri Baraka

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

— Amiri Baraka

8. “There is no justice in America, but it is the fight for justice that sustains you.”

— Amiri Baraka

9. “Hunting is not those heads on the wall.”

— Amiri Baraka

10. “In America, black is a country.”

— Amiri Baraka

11. “I am inside someone who hates me. I look out from his eyes.”

— Amiri Baraka

12. “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 Baraka

13. “The torture of being the unseen object, and the constantly observed subject.”

— Amiri Baraka

14. “Art is a weapon in the struggle of ideas, the class struggle.”

— Amiri Baraka

15. “Art is whatever makes you proud to be human.”

— Amiri Baraka

16. “All cultures learn from each other. The problem is that if the Beatles tell me that they learned everything they know from Blind Willie, I want to know why Blind Willie is still running an elevator in Jackson, Mississippi.”

— Amiri Baraka

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

— Amiri Baraka

18. “Warriors are poets and poems and all the loveliness here in the worlds.”

— Amiri Baraka

19. “Back home the black women are all beautiful.”

— Amiri Baraka

20. “My responsibility is to truth and beauty.”

— Amiri Baraka

21. “The artist’s role is to raise the consciousness of the people. To make them understand life, the world and themselves more completely.”

— Amiri Baraka

22. “If you are black, the only roads into the mainland of American life are through subservience, cowardice, and loss of manhood. These are the white man’s roads.”

— Amiri Baraka

23. “James Brown and Frank Sinatra are two different quantities in the universe. They represent two different experiences of the world.”

— Amiri Baraka

24. “The 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 Baraka

25. “The 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

26. “I’d say I’m a revolutionary optimist. I believe that the good guys -the people- are going to win.”

— Amiri Baraka

27. “God is man idealized.”

— Amiri Baraka

28. “The landscape should belong to the people who see it all the time.”

— Amiri Baraka

29. “Words have users, but as well, users have words. And it is the users that establish the world’s realities.”

— Amiri Baraka

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

— Amiri Baraka

31. “We take unholy risks to prove we are what we cannot be. For instance, I am not even crazy.”

— Amiri Baraka

32. “Who has ever stopped to think of the divinity of Lamont Cranston?”

— Amiri Baraka

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

— Amiri Baraka

34. “A man is either free or he is not.”

— Amiri Baraka

35. “A system that warehouses people is not the cure for social ills.”

— Amiri Baraka

36. “The artist’s role is to raise the consciousness of the people.”

— Amiri Baraka