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" 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

World

You

Life

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

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" Spike Lee is part of a retrograde movement in this country. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" I met Malcolm the month before he was killed. He deeply changed my mind about America. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" If 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. "

" 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. "

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

Amiri Baraka

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Said

" 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. "

" I came to my Marxist view as a result of having struggled as a nationalist and found certain dead ends theoretically and ideologically, as far as nationalism was concerned, and had to reach out for a communist ideology. "

" Thought 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. "

" The man who buried Malcolm X - my Muslim imam, priest - he, after I got beat up by police... came to me, and he said, 'You don't need this American name.' And I was susceptible to it at the time because, God knows, I had just gotten whipped near to death. So he gave me an Arab name; he gave me the name Amir Barakat. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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! "

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

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

" I had just been in some repressive situations - the black middle-class college scene and the crazy United States Air Force - and so I just felt like getting out of that. I thought, now, that I wanted to be a writer. I had something that I wanted to do, that I was interested in doing, so I wanted to pursue that. "

" '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. "