Life is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.
JAMES A. BALDWINRage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence, and therefore is not susceptible to any arguments whatsoever.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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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 think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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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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You write in order to change the world.
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For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.
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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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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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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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A man’s balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.
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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 world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
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Hatred destroys the person who hates.
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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.
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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.
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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