If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, fire next time.
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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It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
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Hatred destroys the person who hates.
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A man’s balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.
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There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
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Life is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.
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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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The reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.
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For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.
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The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
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The writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art
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There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.
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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.
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The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
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One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
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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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It is impossible to pretend that you are not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time and place that give you life — without becoming, at very best, a dangerously disoriented human being.
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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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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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And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.
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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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A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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The determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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At four o’clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
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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