A man’s balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.
JAMES A. BALDWINThere is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.
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If the word ‘integration’ means anything, this is what it means that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.
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I must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them. . . . I know the spiritual wasteland to which that road leads . . . whoever debases others is debasing himself.
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Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence, and therefore is not susceptible to any arguments whatsoever.
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I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
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It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
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The determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own: in the face of one’s victim, one sees oneself.
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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.
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
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The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
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Remember, to hate, to be violent, is demeaning. It means you’re afraid of the other side of the coin — to love and be loved.
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You write in order to change the world.
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You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. [and then you discover that others have suffered much more than you and your problems look good in comparison]
JAMES A. BALDWIN