At four o’clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
JAMES A. BALDWINIf 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.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
-
-
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
Artists are here to disturb the peace.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
You write in order to change the world.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
There is no way of conveying to the corpse the reasons you have made him one–you have the corpse, and you are, thereafter, at themercy of a fact which missed the truth, which means that the corpse has you.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
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. BALDWIN -
If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you’ll never make it.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
When the South has trouble with its Negroes – when the Negroes refuse to remain in their “place” – it blames “outside agitators” and “Northern interference.” When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
JAMES A. BALDWIN