It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
JAMES A. BALDWINWhen 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.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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It is impossible to pretend that you are not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time and place that give you life — without becoming, at very best, a dangerously disoriented human being.
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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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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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You write in order to change the world.
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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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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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Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
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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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Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
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A man’s balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.
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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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The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.
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I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.
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Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.
JAMES A. BALDWIN