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. BALDWINAnd 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.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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A devotion to humanity is… too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.
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I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.
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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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I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.
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The writer’s only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art
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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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The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
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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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You write in order to change the world.
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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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Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
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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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Hatred destroys the person who hates.
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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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You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
JAMES A. BALDWIN








