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.
JAMES A. BALDWINYou 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.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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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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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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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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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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At four o’clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
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A man’s balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs.
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Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
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The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
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The writer’s greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.
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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 met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
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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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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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Hatred destroys the person who hates.
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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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN