Hatred destroys the person who hates.
JAMES A. BALDWINTo 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.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
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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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The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
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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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… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
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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.
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At four o’clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
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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.
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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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If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you’ll never make it.
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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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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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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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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN