American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
JAMES BALDWINI imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
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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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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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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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People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.
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Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
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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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Youth must be the worst time in anybody’s life.
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You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
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The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
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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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To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
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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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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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The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.
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Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.
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Whoever debases others is debasing himself.
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You 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.
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People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.
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For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for what they become.
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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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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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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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Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.
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Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.
JAMES BALDWIN