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. 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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Artists are here to disturb the peace.
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For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.
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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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Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
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The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
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One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience.
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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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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 have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.
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A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
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Drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.
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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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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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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 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.
JAMES A. BALDWIN