… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
JAMES A. BALDWINIt 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.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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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.
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A man’s balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.
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It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
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The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
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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.
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The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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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.
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It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
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I must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them. . . . I know the spiritual wasteland to which that road leads . . . whoever debases others is debasing himself.
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You write in order to change the world.
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The determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
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At four o’clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
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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