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. BALDWINThere 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.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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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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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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Life is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.
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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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You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.
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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 determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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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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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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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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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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The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
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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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Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
JAMES A. BALDWIN