Artists are here to disturb the peace.
JAMES A. BALDWINAt four o’clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
More James A. Baldwin Quotes
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To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
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.
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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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At four o’clock in the morning, when everyone is drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.
JAMES A. BALDWIN -
The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.
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Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.
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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 male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.
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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.
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I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.
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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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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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I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
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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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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