A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
It 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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
A man’s balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
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 A. BALDWIN -
The writer’s greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
Hatred destroys the person who hates.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
Life is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
The reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.
JAMES A. BALDWIN







