You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
JAMES A. BALDWINIt is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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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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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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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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The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
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The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
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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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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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I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
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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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Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.
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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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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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… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
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The writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art
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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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN







