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.
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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For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.
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You write in order to change the world.
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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their weapon against life, life is all that they have.
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If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, fire next time.
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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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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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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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If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
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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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The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
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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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The determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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If the word ‘integration’ means anything, this is what it means that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.
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The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
JAMES A. BALDWIN








