The reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.
JAMES A. BALDWINTo accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
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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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A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
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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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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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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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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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The purpose of education…is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.
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One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
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If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you’ll never make it.
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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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To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
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… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
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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. BALDWIN