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 BALDWINPeople are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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Love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don’t panic now.
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Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.
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Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.
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Literature is indispensable to the world.
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The impossible is the least that one can demand.
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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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There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
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American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
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Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
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Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.
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Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
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Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
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The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks at reality, then you can change it.
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There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.
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Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.
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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 price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
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To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.
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When you’re writing you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.
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If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person.
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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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People can cry much easier than they can change.
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The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
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There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.
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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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Youth must be the worst time in anybody’s life.
JAMES BALDWIN