I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
JAMES BALDWINYou write in order to change the world, if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.
More James Baldwin Quotes
-
-
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
JAMES BALDWIN -
For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
JAMES BALDWIN -
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.
JAMES BALDWIN -
The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.
JAMES BALDWIN -
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
JAMES BALDWIN -
People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.
JAMES BALDWIN -
The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
JAMES BALDWIN -
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
JAMES BALDWIN -
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
JAMES BALDWIN -
If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.
JAMES BALDWIN -
The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.
JAMES BALDWIN -
History is not a procession of illustrious people. It’s about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.
JAMES BALDWIN -
No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
JAMES BALDWIN -
The impossible is the least that one can demand.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Youth must be the worst time in anybody’s life.
JAMES BALDWIN -
I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.
JAMES BALDWIN -
People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.
JAMES BALDWIN -
The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.
JAMES BALDWIN -
If a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.
JAMES BALDWIN -
It is easy to proclaim all souls equal in the sight of God; it is hard to make men equal on earth in the sight of men.
JAMES BALDWIN