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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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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The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.
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For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.
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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.
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I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
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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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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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It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
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Hatred destroys the person who hates.
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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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Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
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The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
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You write in order to change the world.
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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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At four o’clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
JAMES A. BALDWIN