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. BALDWINYou 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]
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.
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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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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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Life is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.
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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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For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.
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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.
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Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
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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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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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You write in order to change the world.
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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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.
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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.
JAMES A. BALDWIN