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. BALDWINHatred destroys the person who hates.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
The determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
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 -
I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
At four o’clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
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 -
Life is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
At bottom, to be colored means that one has been caught in some utterly unbelievable cosmic joke, a joke so hideous and in such bad taste that it defeats all categories and definitions.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
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 -
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
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 -
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 -
There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
A man’s balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.
JAMES A. BALDWIN








