Amiri Baraka Quotes

Whoever defines the word, defines the world.

If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

It is not important whether or not the interpretation is correct-- if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

The world consists of images on a screen, and consciousness is the steady light that emanates from the projector.

A man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality.

What rules the world is idea, because ideas define the way reality is perceived.

The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.

Words themselves are innocuous; it is the consensus that gives them true power.

Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it.

You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Paty, which is collective and immortal.

The layman always means, when he says "reality" that he is speaking of something self-evidently known; whereas to me it seems the most important and exceedingly difficult task of our time is to work on the construction of a new idea of reality.

You say they create their own reality," said Veronika, "but what is reality?

In short, I'm pretty suspicious of the idea that there's a real and true and authentic world, and then a bunch of false ones.

The magic of words is that they have power to do more than convey meaning; not only do they have the power to make things clear, they make things happen.

The old idea that words possess magical powers is false; but its falsity is the distortion of a very important truth. Words do have a magical effect - but not in the way that magicians supposed, and not on the objects they were trying to influence. Words are magical in the way they affect the minds of those who use them.

A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.

I see the artist as a participant, a co-producer of reality.

Words are so awesome. Words are containers for power. They carry either creative power or destructive power.

There seems to be no agent more effective than another person in bringing a world for oneself alive, or, by a glance, a gesture, or a remark, shriveling up the reality in which one is lodged.

We don't realize how much we create reality through language. If we say that life is hard, it will be hard.

Paranoiac-critical activity makes the world of delirium pass onto the plane of reality.

Language creates reality. Words have power. Speak always to create joy.

The entire universe - for one thing - only exists in your perceptions. That's all you're gonna see of it. To all practical intents and purposes this is purely some kind of lightshow that's being put on in the kind of neurons in our brain. The whole of reality.

The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.

We cannot study the brain, the instrument for fabricating the realities we inhabit, using the mental constructs of the past.