Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.
JAMES BALDWINYou 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.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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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.
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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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Love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don’t panic now.
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The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
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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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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.
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Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
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People can cry much easier than they can change.
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When you’re writing you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.
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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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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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The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.
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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
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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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Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
JAMES BALDWIN