Amiri Baraka Quotes
Jimmy Baldwin was not only a writer, an international literary figure: he was a man, spirit, voice - old and black and terrible as that first ancestor.
Quotes to Explore
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Anyone can wear any color. The question is about finding the right shade. There is a momentary trend to dark colors because when the financials are not that great, people go for black, navy and grey.
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African-Americans are not a monolithic group. So, we tend to talk about the black community, the black culture, the African-American television viewing audience, but there are just as many facets of us as there are other cultures.
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The economic dynamic in Zimbabwe is perversely robust: while ordinary people suffer, black-market dealers and people with foreign bank accounts prosper, making them powerful stakeholders in the perpetuation of devastating economic policies.
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Black glutinous rice works in both savoury and sweet dishes. It's a popular pudding rice in south-east Asia, where you'll often come across it cooked with water, coconut milk and a pandan leaf.
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Eddie Conway is central to my first memories. My parents used to take me to, when it was open, the Baltimore city penitentiary to see Eddie Conway - I was talking to my dad about this recently - from the time I might have been one or two years old. I mean, literally, my first memories are of black men in jail, specifically of Eddie Conway.
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I'm comfortably asocial - a hermit in the middle of a large city, a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty and drive.
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At one time if you were a black writer you had to be one of the best writers in the world to be published. You had to be great. Now you can be good. Mediocre. And that's good.
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Black people can be the most conservative, the most discriminating. Especially among ourselves. It wasn't white people who said all black men have to wear baggy jeans.
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If your response to the first black president is to say they weren't born in this country... you might be a white supremacist.
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When you say that you are a race man, it means that you embrace the entire black community regardless of the hue, whether somebody is very light and could pass for possibly white or someone is very dark.
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All these police treating our people wrong, man. Black lives matter, but we got fans of all different colors, so all lives matter.
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We were in the heart of the ghetto in Chicago during the Depression, and every block - it was probably the biggest black ghetto in America - every block also is the spawning ground practically for every gangster, black and white, in America too.
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Like the Negro League players, I traveled through the segregated south as a young man. Because I was black, I was denied service at many restaurants and could only drink from water fountains marked 'Colored.' When I went to the movies, I would have to sit in the Colored balcony.
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Black is not a color.
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The pattern of a newspaperman's life is like the plot of 'Black Beauty.' Sometimes he finds a kind master who gives him a dry stall and an occasional bran mash in the form of a Christmas bonus, sometimes he falls into the hands of a mean owner who drives him in spite of spavins and expects him to live on potato peelings.
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I was 26 when I went to my first acting class. I'm naturally quite shy. I'm a quite private person. There's this really strange acting class in New York called Black Nexxus. For someone who's slightly shy or self-conscious, it's the most frightening thing you can do.
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The only crime I'm guilty of is being a young black woman.
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There was a certain feeling I developed as a young person for black people. Somehow they were able to get pleasure out of things that I couldn't see them enjoying. I heard them sing a lot, and I didn't hear white folks going down the cotton rows singing that much.
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I love black lingerie and white shoes, and I love knives.
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During the 19th-century struggle for women's rights in America, many saw a competition between rights for black people and those for women.
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The record companies really do conspire against the artists. They steal. They cheat. They do whatever they can, especially the black artists.… Sony's Tommy Mottola is the president of the record division. He is mean. He is a racist, and he's very, very, very devilish.
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To retire is to begin to die.
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Writing in form is a way of developing your thinking - your thinking along with the tradition. In a way, it's not you alone, it's you in partnership.
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Jimmy Baldwin was not only a writer, an international literary figure: he was a man, spirit, voice - old and black and terrible as that first ancestor.
