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.
JAMES BALDWINWhoever debases others is debasing himself.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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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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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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We all commit our crimes. The thing is to not lie about them.
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Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark.
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People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
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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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People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.
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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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Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
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All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.
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Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.
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I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.
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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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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 moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
JAMES BALDWIN