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

- Amiri Baraka

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

- Amiri Baraka

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

- Amiri Baraka

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.

- Amiri Baraka

I had a little portable typewriter. I call it my Harlem Literary Fellowship.

- Amiri Baraka

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

- Amiri Baraka

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

- Amiri Baraka

I was Everett LeRoi Jones. My grandfather's name was Everett.

- Amiri Baraka

Mao Zedong was a revolutionary. He made a revolution.

- Amiri Baraka

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

- Amiri Baraka

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

I always liked jazz. And my people liked the old blues, race records and the doo-wop and all that.

- Amiri Baraka

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

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

- Amiri Baraka

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

- Amiri Baraka

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

- Amiri Baraka

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.

- Amiri Baraka

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.

- Amiri Baraka

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

- Amiri Baraka

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.

- Amiri Baraka