A man’s balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.
JAMES A. BALDWINThere 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.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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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.
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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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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.
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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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… every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
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I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
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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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It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.
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You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.
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Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence, and therefore is not susceptible to any arguments whatsoever.
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Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
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The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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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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The determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
JAMES A. BALDWIN