The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
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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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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A devotion to humanity is… too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.
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You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. [and then you discover that others have suffered much more than you and your problems look good in comparison]
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I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
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If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you’ll never make it.
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The writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art
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Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
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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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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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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 reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.
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Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
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There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.
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When the South has trouble with its Negroes – when the Negroes refuse to remain in their “place” – it blames “outside agitators” and “Northern interference.” When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.
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At bottom, to be colored means that one has been caught in some utterly unbelievable cosmic joke, a joke so hideous and in such bad taste that it defeats all categories and definitions.
JAMES A. BALDWIN