You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.
JAMES A. BALDWINThe real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
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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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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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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
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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.
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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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Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
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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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You write in order to change the world.
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And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.
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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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The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
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If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you’ll never make it.
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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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN