A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
JAMES A. BALDWINRage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence, and therefore is not susceptible to any arguments whatsoever.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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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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At four o’clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
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You write in order to change the world.
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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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
A man’s balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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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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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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There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.
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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 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.
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Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.
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There is no way of conveying to the corpse the reasons you have made him one–you have the corpse, and you are, thereafter, at themercy of a fact which missed the truth, which means that the corpse has you.
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The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their weapon against life, life is all that they have.
JAMES A. BALDWIN