The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
JAMES A. BALDWINYou have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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Life is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.
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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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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 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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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.
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Remember, to hate, to be violent, is demeaning. It means you’re afraid of the other side of the coin — to love and be loved.
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I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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If 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.
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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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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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There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.
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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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Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
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You write in order to change the world.
JAMES A. BALDWIN