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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.

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

Clay Crack Past
One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

One Thing Writing
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Blame Refuse Trouble
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Empathy Pain Thinking
I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Feelings People Thinking
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

Done May People Spiritual
The determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Determination Lessons Mean
The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Men Myth Real Superiority White
… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Human Miracle Unprecedented
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Children Education Teacher
The reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Racism Thinking White
There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Baby Funny Uplifting
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

Greed Needs Writing
The writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Art Order Real
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Mean Race Taste
For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.
JAMES A. BALDWIN

Children Pay Profit

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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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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