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.
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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The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.
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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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The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
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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 write in order to change the world.
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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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For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.
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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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
You 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]
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
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. BALDWIN -
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 -
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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
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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Hatred destroys the person who hates.
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The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their weapon against life, life is all that they have.
JAMES A. BALDWIN