American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
JAMES BALDWINPeople are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
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The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
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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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Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford.
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If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person.
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I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.
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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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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.
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Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.
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The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
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It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
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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.
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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.
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True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one’s life.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
JAMES BALDWIN