The determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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 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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The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
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There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
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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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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.
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The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.
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Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
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The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.
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Hatred destroys the person who hates.
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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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For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.
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I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
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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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN