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… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.

James A. Baldwin

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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Religious Use Validity
The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Change Life Needs
You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Force Idea World
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Humanity Justice Law
You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Goal Want Writing
Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Answer Heart Question
I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Feelings People Thinking
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Country Made People Philanthropy
The writer’s greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Greed Needs Writing
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Sky Trouble World
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Clay Crack Past
The writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Art Order Real
The purpose of education…is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Decision Education Look
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Coins Hate Mean
When the South has trouble with its Negroes – when the Negroes refuse to remain in their “place” – it blames “outside agitators” and “Northern interference.” When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Blame Refuse Trouble
The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Men Myth Real Superiority White

… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.

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… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.

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