The reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.
JAMES A. BALDWINIt is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. [and then you discover that others have suffered much more than you and your problems look good in comparison]
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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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… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
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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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The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.
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A devotion to humanity is… too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.
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Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
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Hatred destroys the person who hates.
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The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
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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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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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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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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 determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN