You 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 BALDWINThere is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.
More James Baldwin Quotes
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Education is indoctrination if you’re white – subjugation if you’re black.
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You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
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No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
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True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one’s life.
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Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford.
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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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The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
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Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
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Whoever debases others is debasing himself.
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Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.
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Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.
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People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
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I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.
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Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
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There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.
JAMES BALDWIN






