Amiri Baraka

"One of the most persistent traits of the Western white man has always been his fanatical and almost instinctive assumption that his systems and ideas about the world are the most desirable, and further that people who do not aspire to to them, or at least think them admirable, are savages or enemies. The idea that Western thought might be exotic if viewed from another landscape never presents itself to most Westerners."

"LeRoi Jones was also one of the popular poets of the 1968 generation. His most famous line was fast becoming “Up against the wall motherfucker this is a stick-up.” A 1967 East Village “affinity group” named themselves “the Motherfuckers” after the Jones poem. An affinity group used intense intellectual debates as an underpinning for carrying out the kind of media-grabbing street theater that Abbie Hoffman could do so well. During the New York City garbage strike, the Motherfuckers hauled garbage by subway from the redolent mountains of it left on the sidewalks to the newly opened Lincoln Center."

"The Black Artists role in America is to aid in the destruction of America as he knows it. His role is to report and reflect so precisely the nature of the society, and of himself, in that society, that other men will be moved by the exactness of his rendering, and if they are black men, grow strong through this moving, having seen their own strength, and weakness, and if they are white men, tremble, curse, and go mad, because they will be drenched with the filth of their evil."

"When I was saying, White people go to hell, I never had trouble finding a publisher, but when I was saying, Black and white, unite and fight, destroy capitalism, then you suddenly get to be unreasonable."

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

"The poor Negro always remembered himself as an ex-slave and used this as the basis of any dealings with the mainstream of American society. The middle class black man bases his whole existence on the hopeless hypothesis that no one is supposed to remember that for almost three hundred years there was slavery in America, that the white man was a master, the black man a slave. This knowledge, however, is at the root of the legitimate black culture of this country. It is this knowledge, with its attendant muses of self-division, self-hatred, stoicism, and finally quixotic optimism, that informs the most meaningful of Afro-American music."