The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.
JAMES BALDWINThe power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.
JAMES BALDWINTo be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
JAMES BALDWINColour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.
JAMES BALDWINPeople can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.
JAMES BALDWINTrue rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one’s life.
JAMES BALDWINAny real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.
JAMES BALDWINIt is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
JAMES BALDWINYou have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.
JAMES BALDWINOur crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.
JAMES BALDWINHatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
JAMES BALDWINChildren have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
JAMES BALDWINThe impossible is the least that one can demand.
JAMES BALDWINAnyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
JAMES BALDWINI imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
JAMES BALDWINThe place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.
JAMES BALDWINYou write in order to change the world, if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.
JAMES BALDWIN