There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
JAMES A. BALDWINYou write in order to change the world.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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The determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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The reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.
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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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You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
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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 think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
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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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If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, fire next time.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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You write in order to change the world.
JAMES A. BALDWIN