I 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 BALDWINThere are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
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The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.
JAMES BALDWIN -
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.
JAMES BALDWIN -
It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
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Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.
JAMES BALDWIN -
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
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Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.
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If a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe.
JAMES BALDWIN -
Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
JAMES BALDWIN -
Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.
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Youth must be the worst time in anybody’s life.
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People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.
JAMES BALDWIN -
I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
JAMES BALDWIN






