The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
JAMES BALDWINThose kids aren’t dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don’t get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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When you’re writing you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.
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Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
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Any 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.
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Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves 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.
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People can cry much easier than they can change.
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People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
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I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.
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Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
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The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.
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You 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.
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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.
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There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
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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.
JAMES BALDWIN