When the South has trouble with its Negroes – when the Negroes refuse to remain in their “place” – it blames “outside agitators” and “Northern interference.” When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.
JAMES A. BALDWINThe 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.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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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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Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
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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 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]
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It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
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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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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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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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The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
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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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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
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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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Hatred destroys the person who hates.
JAMES A. BALDWIN