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. BALDWINThe purpose of education…is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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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 very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
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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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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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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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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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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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Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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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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I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
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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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The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their weapon against life, life is all that they have.
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You write in order to change the world.
JAMES A. BALDWIN







