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.
JAMES A. BALDWINYou think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. [and then you discover that others have suffered much more than you and your problems look good in comparison]
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 determination to outwit one’s situation means that one has no models, only object lessons.
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You write in order to change the world.
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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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The purpose of education…is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.
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The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
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There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
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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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The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
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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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For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.
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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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At four o’clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
JAMES A. BALDWIN