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 BALDWINFreedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.
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Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.
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Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
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There are people in the world for whom “coming along” is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.
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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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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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No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
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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.
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Those kids aren’t dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don’t get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.
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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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There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.
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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 can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
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You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.
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Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.
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The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
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Love was a country he knew nothing about.
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Literature is indispensable to the world.
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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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If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person.
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We all commit our crimes. The thing is to not lie about them.
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Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford.
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There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.
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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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Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
JAMES BALDWIN