People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.
JAMES BALDWINPeople 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.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.
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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.
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Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
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If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.
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Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
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The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
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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.
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Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.
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If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody
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If a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe.
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The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.
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There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.
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People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
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I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all.
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Love was a country he knew nothing about.
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You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.
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All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.
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Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.
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Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.
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The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
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People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.
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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.
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Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
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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.
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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.
JAMES BALDWIN