- Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
- Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings.
- You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.
- When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn't a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.
- People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
- A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
- Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the battle field.
- American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
- Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
- Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
- Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
- Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
- I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
- I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
- I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
- If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.
- It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.
- It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
- Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
- Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
- Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
- No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.
- No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.
- One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.
- People can cry much easier than they can change.
- The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
- The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
- The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.
- The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.
- The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
- The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.
- Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
- To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
- Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.
- Anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
- Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
- Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
- Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.
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James Baldwin Quotes
By Jessica McElrath, About.com
Sept. 13, 1955.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten collection.
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