Life is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.
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 can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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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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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.
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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 reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.
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I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
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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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For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.
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Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
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The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
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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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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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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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One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
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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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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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You write in order to change the world.
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The purpose of education…is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.
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It is impossible to pretend that you are not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time and place that give you life — without becoming, at very best, a dangerously disoriented human being.
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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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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 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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There is no way of conveying to the corpse the reasons you have made him one–you have the corpse, and you are, thereafter, at themercy of a fact which missed the truth, which means that the corpse has you.
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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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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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It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
JAMES A. BALDWIN