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.
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 purpose of education…is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own: in the face of one’s victim, one sees oneself.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
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 -
Life is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
You write in order to change the world.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
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 -
For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
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 -
Artists are here to disturb the peace.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
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







