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. BALDWINYou don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
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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.
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Hatred destroys the person who hates.
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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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Life is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.
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There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.
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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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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.
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A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
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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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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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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 responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
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The determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
JAMES A. BALDWIN