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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

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

Anger Argument Rage
I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Feelings People Thinking
For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Children Pay Profit
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
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
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 don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Emotion Home Leave Left Universe
At four o’clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Drunk Morning Wine
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Attention Eye Men
It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Country Education Independent
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
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

Earth Life Weapons
You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Goal Want Writing
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 reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Racism Thinking White
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Becoming Giving Heirs

The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.

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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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